Well having been in the person in charge of a major news website myself I can say we all have lovely designs like this pinned to the walls next our desks.

And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique...

I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really.

Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news.

And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business.

He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next.

The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack.

..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching.

The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages.

We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;)

Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you.

The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself.

But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer.

Infographics takes time, and its something that Google and Twitter have taken away from news journalists by the creation of an attention economy. You need to break a story immediately or you run the risk of not covering your production costs.

You don't have time to crunch numbers, you are literally scrambling for eyeballs to stay in business. You can do it with editorials fine, and one trick I learnt quick was guest bloggers are GOLD. They often bring a crowd with them, they often have great researched stories, infographics you name it. So it became my goal to build those relationships.

But alas 3 months without weekends, high pressure workload, high pressure targets, unyielding worldwide competition take a toll. So I quit. Theres still an open position for me if I want to return, but I don't think I'm ready just yet ;)

EDIT: I don't mean to be harsh towards Andy. I love his work, and his intellectual exercise into improvement is great. I even forwarded it onto my old team for review.

But what I guess my point is sometimes there a reason why things are crap, and fixing may be a hell of a lot harder the moment you try than you expected.

So don't judge people/teams to harshly, instead offer a hand like Andy has done, sometimes they need it (especially in big media)