How to add a new page that will function as a separate blog/news article page

Through doing some poking around, the short answer is NO. There cannot be two actual blog pages on a site. For my purposes I wanted a “Blog page” which needed to be customized to show only one category and I wanted to make a very customized template (multi columns for instance), and STILL have a another page which will display another category or an archive.

The SOLUTION: Use a pluggin with shortcode to output a category or categories to a different static page. It can be customized by using some css columns. One might also do this -but I don’t want the page displayed in a menu.

The limitations though are that making a display template that is very customized for a second display is harder.