If there are 1,000 newspaper.com sites, at least 999 of them — the one exception linked below — present users with way too many choices. For example, as pretty as the Houston Chronicle site is, it’s overloaded and bloated with links. WashingtonPost.com is a great web site, but suffers from an explosion of home page links.
Joel Spolsky writes about simplicity in software — keeping choices to a minimum, specifically avoiding redundancy, but his points should be considered by news site designers, as well.
Newspaper.com sites need to be less confusing, offer more direct choices, and recognize that the home page isn’t the only gateway into a web site (in other words, we don’t need to cram every last link onto that single, beleaguered default index page).
That said, I think SavannahNow is a little severe.
