Oh man...I found the issue, and it's my fault.
In my design time view model, I had not initialized the list, and in the constructor, was trying to add items to it.
This fixed it
private List<NewsItem> _itemListView = new List<NewsItem>();
public List<NewsItem> ItemListView
{
get { return _itemListView; }
set { _itemListView = value; }
}
The lesson I learned here is that the error message "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" can mean you're view model is broken, even though it doesn't explicitly say. So for anyone starting out with caliburn.micro, unit test your design time view models to make sure they work as expected.