What Do You Want on a News Website?

SomethingBig asks: "The BBC is asking people to redesign their homepage, with the best design winning an Apple laptop. With news websites becoming ever more crowded and cluttered, what is really the most important information for a news organization's homepage? Should it contain local news? Traffic? Weather? What type of information would you want on the BBC's homepage (or CNN's if you're in America)?"

Break it down

[Siberwulf]

I want the ability to drag and drop various parts of the site how I want it to look (similar to google custom homepage, which I love).

I also want to add custom feeds and have a lot of options to choose from.

Did I mention let me customize it how i want?

Portal

[Baricom]

The ideal news site for me would have the following four features:

1. Unobtrusive advertising.
1a. No "free registration" nag.
2. Higher quality pictures and videos (in terms of size and resolution, not necessarily content).
3. Open ended syndication - let your visitors set up your home page to show not only your news, but those of your competitors, if they choose to do so. Let them drag boxes around the page, and provide an API to get modules on your page. (RSS or Atom with support for headline images as enclosures would fit the bill nicely.)

I currently get my news from three places: My Yahoo!, Netvibes (when I get comfortable enough about their privacy practices, it'll be my new home page), and Google News. The thing they have in common is the ability to do massive customization of their home page.

Save the text!

[spongebue]

When I go on CNN, it drives me nuts that the stories I really want to see are usually in video format only. Normally I cannot watch them, usually due to video player problems (in Linux or OS X). Not to mention that there is still a significant number of people on dial-up. Ideally, both video and text would be offered, even if text is verbatim of the video.

Also, it would be cool if there was some kind of "stories you may like" feature made, that pulls together some keywords. So if you tend to read stories about gas prices, and there is a story about record breaking oil costs, it would go on some kind of separate personalized list. Just a thought.

Most if the time;

[Ajehals]

I just want impartial unbiased honest factual relevant interesting up to date reporting to empower me to make my own decisions and take any relevant action I deem necessary....

But occasionally I want opinionated sensationalist one sided reporting with a large dose of tongue in cheek humour and honest to god trolling (then I go to /. :) )

Oh and when I want to know what's happening in United States of America and need a good laugh I check out FOX.

Just one thing

[Phreakiture]

There is one thing I want more than anything else in a news site. If a news article is about a legislative action, then I want bill numbers, amendment numbers and a sidebar that shows me who voted how. That way, I can pick up the phone as soon as I have read the article, without spending two hours trawling through the house/senate web sites looking for the info, and call my elected representatives to either thank them or to tell them they are sons of bitches.

Project Vote-smart is a good step in the right direction, but the database is indexed the wrong way and doesn't touch committees at all. Besides, it isn't a news site. I want it integrated into a news site. [vote-smart.org]

That alone will probably get my undying loyalty.