I must admit that it was with some amused curiosity that the primary thing removed to make the site cleaner was "ads". That along with opening paragraphs were the two major changes in layout.

It seems that the author thought that his solitary 'subscribe' button would provide enough income to support a large media organisation and make it nicely profitable - all internet commentary to the contrary.

The other thing I took away was from the navigation bar. So what if it's long? If I'm a regular user, I prefer a mildly long navigation bar as long as the items stay in the same place. I can then get to the subsection I want very quickly, without having to wait for some eye-pleasing pretty animation slowly exposing the subs of some higher heading. Obviously this is a highly personal issue, but his 'prettier' version of doing this involved horizontal nested menus that take up a monstrous amount of vertical space. Most of us have widescreens (not tallscreens) on our non-mobile devices - and woe betide those folks using netbooks.

I think you're right - it's a nice layout for a blog, but doesn't really suit a rapidly-changing, info-packed news site.