Newsticker can be used with GNU Emacs version 21.1 or later as well as XEmacs. It requires an XML-parser (xml.el) which is part of GNU Emacs. If you are using XEmacs you want to get the net-utils package which contains xml.el for XEmacs.
Newsticker retrieves headlines either via Emacs' built-in retrieval functions, by an arbitrary external program that retrieves files via http and prints them to stdout (like wget, or – on a per feed basis – via an arbitrary Lisp command.