Part of the new design scheme is to never ever post an item with only an external link (which used to be flagged by a chevron, ») in the center main section of the homepage. Every post in that center section will be to a separate, independent page on the site. (The link to that page being the 'permalink'.)
Any news short enough to not warrant creating a separate webpage will go under Blinks. The decision about warranting is mainly a matter of my own time management; I *could* have created a page about M.J. Engh's Author Emerita award, for instance, and filled it out with an explanation, a list of previous winners, and so on, but I always have 15 other things I could be doing instead (such as explaining things in this blog!), and for tonight I've chosen to put that under Blinks, along with the news about Anticipation's special Hugo category. (I even captured and linked their press release for that one.)
I think this will enhance news coverage on the site overall, as long as readers learn to spot news in the Blinks column as well as in the main center section. For instance, I never got around to posting anything about the vote for the 2010 WorldCon (in Melbourne), since it didn't fit into any of the posted news pages, but under the new scheme, I'll allow myself to post such an item as news under Blinks...
Further changes and enhancements are a'cooking.