Some changes to the "new items" page:

1. This page will no longer show items with a publication date less than the current year, when there is a publication date. This was put in place because old material tended to clutter the page. I'm assuming that you don't care about an item being added to PP; rather, you want to know what's new in the sense of newly written or published. Some measures will have to be put in place to deal with N-dated items at beginning of year N+1. 
2. When the area filter is activated, items are no longer grouped by source and publication. This was creating too much clutter.
3. Also when the area filter is on, sorting is not done by date of addition to PP, but by date of addition to the area. This is so that one will not miss anything if one relies on the area-filtered version of this page to monitor new material. If items were sorted by date of addition to PP, an item classified n days after being added to PP could be missed if one does not scroll down n days upon visiting (items would make their first apparitions on this page at random points in it). Other constraints like not being published before current year still apply. 

I also changed the format and sorting of content alerts for material "in my areas". This is in fact a side-effect of changing the new items page, because the emails are just stripped-down renderings of this page.