But the best feature by far is that it acts as a backdoor for paywalled content, but would still pay the publisher (pay per article syndication?). Some of the most popular and newsworthy WSJ/NYT/WaPo content can be found here.
Microsoft News' publishers partnership also gets another network effect positive feature for its search engine - Bing. Search the headline of any paywalled article - "China exploits fleet of U.S. satellites to strengthen police and military power"
This is a perfect Win/Win/Win scenario, facilitated by Microsoft News product. - Microsoft News gets quality content without the newsroom - Publishers get paid - Users get clean, fast, consistent UX and sometimes free access to newsworthy and popular paywalled quality content
Bonus: Microsoft gets a triple win - Bing gets to one up Google in providing free access (and fund journalism) to paywalled content. - MSN with its reach and scale (mobile apps, Edge homepage, Windows 10) can better monetize (ads) the same content better than the publishers.
MSN with its scale is probably generating better revenue than the publisher could itself. I wonder if Microsoft shares the revenue or fixed price syndicates individual article.
Microsoft News operation may have just found a balance between funding journalism and making the public aware of the quality reporting of publishers. - License article (revenue share or fixed price) - Use scale arbitrage (MSN, Edge, Win10 and MSFT News apps) Vs Publisher site