On the Google News blog, it’s been announced that Google has added a “Local Source” tag to surface local coverage of major stories.
The tagging aspect itself is automated. Google is automatically identifying the “Local Source” tag of a story based on “looking at where a publisher has written about int he past and comparing that to the story location.” The tag is now live across all Google News edition, and when a story is expanded by a user, it’ll show you more stories from local publications.
The screen shot that is shown below has been provided by Google:
There is more technical help for the searcher on how to use this feature over here:
A Google News story box is a group of articles about the same news event. These boxes reflect how Google News organizes various articles and multimedia items for a given story. Here are some tips for using this feature and easily navigating between many different perspectives on one story or topic.
Clicking on the box will expand it, showing you more articles for that story. We may also show you one of several types of article that we think are relevant, for example:
Local Source: an article from a source local to the story.