First Item
Date

Leader paragraph that goes with the first item. I'm assuming that leaders would be things like “The New York Times reports that...” or “The Department of Homeland Security has issued a report on...” Leaders would be arbitrary HTML, so could include things like pictures or links. I have my own set of ideas about how such things should be laid out. If there's enough text, it should wrap gracefully around things like images. Note that while this image looks like a thumbnail, if the reader does “View Image” or its equivalent in their browser, the image is actually much larger. News items as they appear in this little scrollable widget would terminate after a certain size. The “Read more...” link would go to a page with the full news item and the comment stream. There should be a page, with appropriate image and text-editing widgets, for constructing a news item.

Second Item
Date

Leader paragraph that goes with the second item.

Third Item
Date