Argghhh.
Yea, I agree, now there is virtually nothing to read on the front page, two squeezed mini articles. Its getting harder and harder to get to the information you need on this site - and I'm looking on a 4K monitor ATM!
Even the person who tried to squeeze it in there realised it was a bad move as they used tiny, tiny fonts for things. Its completely unreadable on the iphone and in general, its getting harder to read el reg from the train due to the random pictures.
Please understand your visitors and what we come here for.
I've not got time to play hunt the article each time I come here. --
Is it in the top right call-out area, nope, Is it in the body area, nope, Is it under the call-out area for the mega article in the middle, nope, its fallen off into older stories.
Suggest removing the new pane, or if you really must have it, then put it where all the pointless pictures are on the right hand side.where it says spotlight as I never use those either.
If you are stuck for space, you could also look de-cluttering the home page and using fluid layouts, 50% of my browser window is whitespace in empty columns. I made the browser that size so you can use it ...
You could also let users customise their page layout after login give me the option to hide the cruft I'm not interested in. then you get some real info on what people want.
For those who want to hide the pane, the div is called news_bytes, so a tweak of the css to display:none; works a treat. I've added the Stylish add-on to chrome to automate that for me.