We have covered Google Webmaster tools errors with News sites in the past. But this is the first time I am seeing reports of Webmaster Tools errors specific to News sites that read "Article too long" as the error. "Article too short" errors are common for News errors, but "too long?" Well, that is new to me.
I spotted two threads at Google News Help Forums with complaints from various publishers.
Google News representative, Inbal, said:
Yes, I see many "Articles too long error" messages for your site indeed :( We'll look into the weirdness in Webmaster tools. Meanwhile, we've updated your site's information in our system. We should begin to crawl more articles with videos embedded between the headline and the summary from your site within a few weeks.
Thing is, it seems like they need to conduct a manual fix for each site with this error. So if you are seeing these errors for your publication, make sure to submit a thread at the forum.
Forum discussion at Google News Help Forums.