Prominent news sites on the web provide hundreds of news articles daily. The abundance of news content competing to attract online attention, coupled with the manual effort involved in article selection, necessitates the timely prediction of future popularity of these news articles. The future popularity of a news article can be estimated using signals indicating the article's penetration in social media (e.g., number of tweets) in addition to traditional web analytics (e.g., number of page views). In practice, it is important to make such estimations as early as possible, preferably before the article is made available on the news site (i.e., at cold start). In this paper we perform a study on cold‐start news popularity prediction using a collection of 13,319 news articles obtained from Yahoo News, a major news provider. We characterize the popularity of news articles through a set of online metrics and try to predict their values across time using machine learning techniques on a large collection of features obtained from various sources. Our findings indicate that predicting news popularity at cold start is a difficult task, contrary to the findings of a prior work on the same topic. Most articles' popularity may not be accurately anticipated solely on the basis of content features, without having the early‐stage popularity values.