A cleaner CNN

The new CNN site definitely looks cleaner and more organized. Breaking the site into sections gives it a highly structured layout. I especially like the sections on the lower half of the page, Politics, Entertainment, Opinion, etc. This gives top news stories by category, allowing users to focus on sections of the most interest to them.
The focus as mentioned in the article is clearly on video. Many of the news stories have a video at the top of the page, with the article following. The format of this is well-structured. I feel like I would watch the video first and read the highlights on the left side. The article itself would be extra information that I probably wouldn't look at too often.
To try keeping the site familiar, they have used a similar color scheme, keeping the majority of the pages white. They also kept the same color, font, and size for the links to the news articles. All of this makes the site stay rather familiar, but with an improved layout.
A couple of things that I don't like too much is the use of advertising space. A whole bar towards the bottom of the page is used for three different advertisements (which are working very well right now), and there is the large square on the top right. I feel like this is too much space dedicated to advertisements. The square on the top right takes up prime real estate, while the bar towards the bottom will not be seen much, yet adds to the overall page length. The other issue is that the main story of the day is in the left column. I would think this should be in the middle section. Without the article mentioning this, I would not have known which story CNN felt was more important.