Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example:
There is a small improvement to the banner on the new front page (/news/0), which is that it's about 4 pixels shorter, and it's now grey instead of black which I think is much less abrasive.
Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.
It's intensely irritating, since it's never breaking and these days with the way the world is it is also worrying.
For me Breaking News should be things like terroist attacks, massive flooding not "Back Off Contestant Falls Over".
It's also handy for the comment sections on newspapers, sections of news sites you are never gonna click/read (in my case sport) and comments on youtube.
Maybe you could resolve the conflict by including a "don't show any more breaking news" button and then taking the data back to Editorial.
Or analyzing the clickstream to see who is being shown breaking news that they already saw, or they're actually reading at the time.
I suspect an optional button would not be very popular, so the data wouldn't achieve the aim you want.
This could be really useful for onboarding people, once onboard they could set up alerts for topics or tick 'follow this story' if for instance they read about someone being brought to trial and they wanted to know the sentencing or even what crimes get committed five years hence once the culprit is out of jail.
Things in the news and the weather could then be pushed/pulled from an app.
As well as topics for 'breaking news' there could also be a colour coded level so if you don't really care about some unknown unknowns getting droned out of existence in far-off-istan (in a 'yellow' terror threat incident) then you don't get an alert for it. Meanwhile, if you are British and some idiot kills people outside parliament then that one pops up as 'breaking news' with no hesitation.
Tsunami alerts are probably handy as 'breaking news', it would be annoying to die in some massive flood due to having turned off the 'breaking news' wholesale just because you had no interest in the French election or 'Frexit'.
I think that they need to just be a bit more imaginative with the feature so that it works for all stakeholders, the editorial department, the reads and everyone in between, up to and including No. 10.
You're doing God's work and a national service that is IMHO worthy of a knighthood, the BBC front page is one of those rare places where a few little engineering cogs can really make a huge difference. Keep up the good fight! Thanks from all of us -- the UK, still missing the old news.bbc 5ish years later :)
And if I ever have the privilege of your CV gracing my inbox, I'd do everything to ensure we got to work together. Thanks again!
The best solution I've come up with is immediately reloading the page in the hope that there's a cookie to stop the "Breaking News" showing again.
I'll just add, really like the new update. The new page feels much better (and the old one is really good already).
But —this is a big "but"— I wouldn't expect this to happen soon. Changes take a long time at the BBC :)
Please, BBC, I really dislike the breaking news banner and I'd love the option to turn it off.