This paper focuses on design issues for multimedia distribution architectures and the impact workload characteristics have on architecture design. Our contribution is an analysis of server load and user behavior in a News-on-Demand environment, with focus on access patterns, popularity modeling, and the formation of traffic peaks. Finally, we evaluate an existing synthetic workload generator, MediSyn, and suggest some enhancements which will improve its suitability for News-on-Demand workload modeling.