Many Google News Publishers are unable to make a good mark and bring rapid presence as compared to other competitors . What many people miss is that due to their technical structure they miss out optional parameters and guidelines which actually adds lot of weight to the ranking.
Lets take a real life example which will bring more clarity . As per the guideline for news article , Google states that “The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits” , also it states that this rule is waived for publishers who have google news sitemap in place.
Also See : https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?hl=en
While observing we found out if we go for only Google news sitemap option then any issue in news-sitemap XML ranging from missing content in tags to unescaped url etc. can affect the crawling of news bot , which in turn will eventually decrease the presence of stories in Google News.
But if we go for Google news sitemap along with presence of greater then 3 digit unique number then chances of getting on Google News was pretty high which will eventually we will increase your referral traffic.
So in case their is some issue with the XML Google News crawler would be able to crawl HTML version , vice versa if their is some issue with your permalink/URL structure then the crawler can fetch the same content meta from XML Amazing !!!! Isn’t it ??