I don't know about about anybody else, but I would open a browser window many, many times in one day and it's rarely to read to read the news. If it was to read the news I'd only read it once that day, thus there's no point in having a news site load in my browser each and every time I open a browser window because chances are i'm going to want to use that window to browse some other site.
If my browser starts loading a news page I've already read and have no interest in reading a second time, then it means I have to iether wait for the news page to finish loading or click the stop button to stop it loading before I can type in a different url to browse to, so personally I set my start up homepage to "about:blank". This way when I open a browser window, the page is blank and ready to use straight away.