Google News hosts some wire service content on Google-owned pages. Many wire services distribute their content through other sources rather than hosting it on their own consumer-facing websites. This is an opportunity for these news sources to directly provide a copy of their content online.
Up to now, Google News has provided separate links to each publication's re-printing of a given newswire story. As a result, there's been a fair amount of duplicate content linked from Google News.
We don't think it's optimal that users see the exact same article linked from various results. Additionally, we want to provide articles' original publishers, the newswires, with the credit they deserve.
We believe this partnership will be good for both Google News users and news publishers. If you're a wire service interested in a partnership with Google, please contact us.
Note: when a newswire article appears on Google News, the first result will be the link to the original newswire article. However, you'll still have the option to see all sources that published the same article.