Maile Ohye discussed about how to optimize the news article to rank well on Google News in Youtube Google Webmaster Help channel. She discussed several points that will help you make your news site to be more visible on Google News and even on their web search. As you can see today on Google web search, almost all SERPs for even high competitive keywords, News and Press Releases (PR) are very visible on page one. This is a great avenue or source of traffic for your site and I think a worth thing to look at.
One thing that she stated on her discussion was the importance of Google News sitemap for your site. Its a convenience both for the publisher and for them in crawling your site. If your news site’s back end is the CMS WordPress, you can install the Google News Sitemap plug-in to automatically generate the said XML sitemap then submit it to them.
By the way, here’s the video containing the discussion of Maile Ohye on SEO for Google News: