Permalinks – different depending on category?

Hope someone can help with this.

I am just in the process of migrating a blog from the MetroPublisher platform to WordPress.

I’m just about there, but trying to make sure any old links to the blog still work.

Unfortunately the MP structure doesn’t match WP, so I’m trying to see if I can do anything clever with the permalinks.

Basically the old blog had three section:

– news
– conservation blog
– wildlife blog

Regular news stories made up most posts, and were of the form:

https://www.mydomain.com/post-title/

So that’s painless enough just using the custom structure:

https://www.mydomain.com//%postname%/

But the other two are of the form:

https://www.mydomain.com/blogs/conservation-blog/post-title/
https://www.mydomain.com/blogs/wildlife-blog/post-title/

So my question is whether or not its possible to have some of my posts have a URL that does include the category (and I guess parent category), and some not have the category?

Hope that makes sense to someone!

Thank you.