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News lists must present usable page lengths, story headlines, and descriptions.
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Long lists are not necessarily a result of many news items. Large headline sizes and white space between news items may also result in long lists.
Lists presented in one of multiple columns increase the visual length of lists. As a result only very little text is visible on the users screen and the user easily loose his situational awareness (where am I on this page?).
White space (tab, new paragraph) is a simple yet powerful way to separate news items. While horizontal lines and large headlines tend to slow down users' reading speed, white space support scanning. The disadvantage of white space is the consumption of pixels. On the other hand, news lists are rarely read if they are too compact.
Small fonts are often used to promote top stories or related stories on story pages. This is, however, a bad habit. While small fonts may make the design look good, it also makes reading unnecessarily difficult.
Headlines have one purpose: To allow scanning. Scanning is enabled through short and accurate headlines. It is therefore better to write a headline in three words instead of eight. But only if the headline stays informative. For example, it is better to use the headline News list usability for the present article than News lists optimized for usability. Editorial resources are needed to make usable headlines happen on an ongoing basis.
Story descriptions can add value to the user experience if space allows. But human factor studies show that descriptions are useless if they are written with small fonts. Narrow tables make the same usability problem happen. Also, descriptions need to be kept short - one or two sentences are usually enough.
Time stamps are used by news streams to create an illusion of up-to-the-minute updates (e.g., August 1 15:43 GMT+1). But the illusion come at a high cost. Most importantly, time stamps steal attention from other information. A single time stamp is often enough to tell users that news is updated daily or hourly. Further, most news sites also include time stamps on the page where the actual story is published.
In any case, site and news streams with a strong emphasis on publication time probably don't deliver news that is worth reading.
Weblogs provide an important exception because their raison d'être is to link to the outside Web world. Weblog authors may be as interested in generating outgoing traffic as ingoing because users will be back for more recommended links if they liked the previous ones.
Link titles are useful as users get additional information about links before clicking them. Link titles appear when users hold the mouse over a link. For some reason, current news sites rarely provide link titles. I suspect this is due to the extra effort needed.