Did you know that if you are in Google News, you need to keep your pages below 256 KB to get your articles indexed by the Google News Bot?
A Google News Help thread has Googler, Inbal, explaining to one publisher why his articles were no longer being included in the Google News index. She said:
Thank you for bringing these errors to our attention. It appears that your site's pages are too large. The hub or article page length exceeds the maximum allowed. Pages can be 256KB long. I've updated your site's information in our system. We should begin to crawl more articles from your site within a few weeks.
As you can see, it does appear that Google can make an exception to the rule. She did say that she updated the "site's information in our system" and Google News will begin to crawl the site again soon.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.