You are not very specific about your problem, but I suspect it’s the message "Created new browser window in existing session", which seems to be caused by starting chrome.
I suspect that when you set your default browser in newsbeuter to a simple shell script which starts chrome but disregards the standard output/standard error, the problem goes away:
#!/bin/sh
exec google-chrome $* >/dev/null 2>&1
Also, as a general hint: i3 never draws window contents, it only draws borders. When an application has any kind of corruption in its window, that is usually either a driver problem or caused by the application itself. In terminal apps, Ctrl-L usually triggers a refresh.