Google released a Sitemaps protocol and reporting engine for the Google News index. I am lucky enough to be included in Google News, so I am able to share with you some of the reports I have in my Sitemaps account. For a top level "News crawl," you can see the full screen capture by clicking here.
The first "News-specific errors" it shows me is from Nov 15, 2006, with the error message, Title not found. Google links all errors to pages with more details, so the Title not found message says;
We were unable to extract a title for the article from the HTML page. Try setting the <title> tag on the HTML page to the title of the article, and repeating the title in a prominent place on the HTML page, such as in an <h1> tag. Also ensure that the title is not too long or too short. Currently, the title is required to be between 2 and 22 words, inclusive.
The page that had "title not found" was an old article written by Ben back on March 9, 2005 named Eye Tracking and Search Combine To Show Us The Golden Triangle. The title looks ok to me, so I am not sure if this is a valid error or not.
Other errors I have in my report include; Article disproportionately short, Article fragmented and No sentences found. The no sentence found was for this page which makes sense.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
