All that fuss about upgrading to the new News Sitemap format and now we see Google News has not crawled or indexed any new News Sitemaps files since June 3rd.
A Google News Help thread has a single post from Googler, Inbal. Inbal is responding to a lot of questions in the Google News help forum about them indexing the News Sitemap file.
Inbal said:
We've recently noticed that at least since June 3rd we haven't added any new News sitemaps to our crawl. Please be assured that our engineering team is working to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to resolve this issue in the near future.
I don't know how big of an issue this is in terms of crawling but some new publishers are also complaining at WebmasterWorld. So I think this only impacts new publishers or even old publishers with new Sitemap files but everyone else should be fine.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
