Good to have this option. I hope the ongoing attention from MS also encourages more third-party Widgets.
I keep wanting to like MSN news, and from a technical and UI perspective, I do. But it's just so filled with opinion sources, where actual fact-presentation without opinions (true news) is secondary to their agendas. I can't set it to include the news sources I want (in my case, it's primarily my paid WSJ subscription -- has excellent hard news and keeps the opinions to the editorials). To its credit, in the Widgets bar, we can turn off the ones we don't like, but no way to elevate the sources we prefer to the Widgets bar.
My current work-around has been, sadly, to remove most of the news topics, except for tech and entertainment. That gets the political opinions off the Widgets bar.
Really, if you have a news feed, it would be nice for an option to include news stories and remove or separate the opinion pieces (I realize that many sites on both sides politically bill themselves as news, but include a lot of opinion, so this is not a black and white distinction). Or, at least provide equal weight for left-leaning, but still mainly news sources like the Washington Post and right-leaning news sources like Washington Times or NY Post, or networks like ABC News on the left and Fox News on the right. Similarly, give equal weight to sites on both sides of political issues that lean more heavily toward opinion than news, like LA Times and Huffpost on the left and the National Review and RedState on the right. The problem is that MSN sources tend to skew heavily toward the left-leaning opinion sites over news and mostly exclude parallel sources from the right.
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