Post to specific catergories in a newspaper column format

Is there a way to different posts that I specify be shown in specific categories (ex. sports vs. world news) on the home page of the blog, and under the respective category in the archieve/ category?

I looked in the “Loop” but with my limited programming knowledge couldn’t make sense of the suggested examples.

Can anyone suggest code that they’ve used (or I should use) or a set of plugins that could be added?

Thanks in advance!