On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.
I created
https://legiblenews.com/ because of this frustration ... and took it all the way to the level where loading a page is exactly 1 request.
The other frustration I’ve had with news websites is they don’t link to source material, so it’s impossible to dig into a topic and accidentally learn something.
I like it. However given your goal of delivering sane and lighweight news articles you might want to extend that mission to the selection of your sources and consider excluding some. For the Boris Johnson story you link to The Independent, which returns a 14 MB article (while autplaying is disabled in Firefox) and basically has become a collection of worst practices when it comes to user experience and web development. Surely there must be better sources for popular stories like these.
I wish they would use more of that on mobile or even the old m.cnn.com. The more recent trend of "www-m.cnn.com" URLs is glacially slow, even when going through a Raspberry Pi.
I haven't looked at the actual data, but if I go to cnn.com, which I visit routinely enough, I imagine most of the assets are already cached. The ads and embedded video, though, are a bandwidth sink.
