Users are looking for news sites to inform them what is important at a particular moment in time.
Surfacing topical categories and themes, simple two words in length. This provides an alternative to scanning story titles. Story titles tend to be consumed with a "lean-in" behavior requiring more time to aborb clickablity resulting in a lower chance of click through. As users seek out more and more news, the chances of encountering the same or similar story titles across mulitple sites increases. Opportunites are present for presenting content as topics/themes related to trending keywords, providing easy "jump-in" points for users to be totally immersed in a particualar focus.
Possibly consider the notion of "category surfing" based on keywords out on the main stage to support users seeking out "news that's different, but still news."
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