I clicked on the link and got the interstitial advertisement page for 15 seconds. It's kind of silly that I need to go through an ad just to see the homepage. I understand that they need to cover their costs with ads, and it's great that they're experimenting to make their site more usable and clear, but Reuters (and other companies that do this... Rotten Tomatoes was particularly bad for a while) need to realize that the first impression is the ad, and not the homepage, and that's a huge turn off to anyone visiting for the first time.

Yes, that sure made a bad impression.

Does anyone know if this is done in-house, or if they hired someone?

Update: Nevermind, it's done by HUGE Inc. (http://www.hugeinc.com/news/reuters-redesign)

does that whole bottom static bar bother anyone else? I've noticed it a lot now, CNET for example. Lots of sites seem to try to copy the FB chat bar, and it's bloody annoying.

Yes, very annoying. It makes me feel like I'm viewing the site in frames.

It bothers me a bit too, feels like there's something stuck there. At least this one is a lot more blended in and doesn't stick out as much as others (like ones which aren't even full width).

Yeah, not to mention that for some reason Firefox scrolls such pages in slow-mo.

I initially thought that the black colored article links on the left was a paragraph of text with insane line spacing.

Doesn't make me want to use the site because I can't read many titles together and decide on what to read

Loads rather slow here too