You may remember when designer Andy Rutledge challenged The New York Times to rethink its news design approach by proposing his own innovative design (and the stir it caused on Twitter). Now that design is a reality thanks to WooThemes, the premium WordPress theme developers, who purchased the rights to his design and released it as a theme called Currents.

A few features of the design:

• Fully responsive design. This means that no matter the browser size or device, the design adapts to the screen to give users the optimum visual experience. Read more about The Boston Globe’s implementation of this concept.
• Featured posts slider. A rotating slider to highlight your best content.
• Big, beautiful story photos. At the story level, photos are displayed full width.
• Custom news areas. Recent news, featured category, related news.
• Author profiles. In a design tailored toward publishers, Woo Themes developers say they’ve , “put an extra effort in to make it easy to have multiple authors, with a custom author page template and custom author widget.” Author pages come baked with social features, too!
• A focus on headlines. And the ability to easily-display excerpts/summaries if you don’t like the “less is more” concept.
• Custom typography. This is huge for newspapers in print, but doesn’t translate well online. This theme makes it easy.
• Custom widgets. Customizable sidebar and footer for features like ads, author lists, video, etc.).
• Alternative styles. With options to customize individual elements.

View a live demo of the theme.