This is a great example of a clean, minimalist Wordpress news-theme with a nice emphasis on images. Could see this being used for a recipe or food site.

Homepage uses  a slick featured content well, and stays uncluttered by employing two top menus – the supernav for the less-accessed things like “About Us”, etc, and primary navigation is reserved for categories (and subcategories) of content. The homepage has a prominent place for the once very common popular box, which showcases the most popular etc. posts: “Popular”, “Latest”, “Comments”, “Tags”.

Category landing pages have a nice presentation – similar to the homepage, they’re not just a bunch of text links slapped together. The subcategory landing pages are a bit more typical.

Overall, a nice theme, but a little bit too much white space for my taste.

Live Demo | More Info

This Wordpress theme by Solostream offers critical magazine-style features with some emphasis on community. A big check to my #1 must-have — a category-based nav — as well as a large and potentially auto-scrolling main feature. But prominent too is the “most popular”/comments/tags/etc block on the HP; recent comments and gravatars get play as well. Comments on the article pages are nicely color-blocked.

The version I’m referring to is the version in the live demo; the theme comes with several different layouts for its HP and category pages.

Live Demo | More Info

Among all of PremiumNewsTheme’s themes (See the Live Wire series, for example), I’ve got a soft spot for Flash News. I like the auto scrolling main feature (which runs a touch too fast, but that can be changed), I like the look-and-feel, and I really like how the two nav menus are separated. I also like that there’s a separate video channel, and I like the big footer. I’m not particularly fond of the flickr widget, but I’m sure that too can easily be changed.

More Info/Live Demo

No, the screenshot you are looking at is not CNN. Can’t tell whether it’s the font, the red or something else, but this theme certainly lives up to its name. Gazette is a solid mag-style (or should I say, news-style) theme in a three-column HP design, with some standout features, such as the arresting auto-scroll main feature as well as most-recent posts from different categories as the secondary featured articles.

As with many of PremiumNewsTheme themes, Gazette has prominent search, rss/email and “most popular” module — all tops for me.

More Info | Live Demo