Realneo - Original news source? and/or Syndicator/Aggregator? Does Google care?

Like every reader, my attention is grabbed by news reports about creativity and unique events.  

Today, Google News carried a piece about the two Canadian high school fellows who sent a helium balloon with cameras to the stratisphere and then recovered the cameras.  The news media has dubbed the advanture "Lego Man in Space" because the balloon carried a Lego man holding the Canadian maple leaf flag and the on board cameras recorded images of the man/flag against the curvature of the earth.  

I wanted to discuss this event - as it relates to low cost technology - drones, balloons, cell phones, GIS, mapping software - which are now available to the general public and not just available to the military,  and I wanted to link to the original news release for the Lego Man adventure - but I couldn't find/determine which was the orinigal news source. 

Google is working on the original source problem [1].

In my looking for the original source I also found the following advice (on http://searchengineland.com [2]).

Top 10 NEGATIVE Google news ranking factors:

1.  Duplicate Content

Just as in traditional Web SEO, duplicate content was determined to be the biggest negative factor. And while plenty of news sites create duplicate content on their own, those surveyed focused on the use of other sources’ content on your site, particularly scraped or plagiarized content.

Google is getting better at determining the original source of the content and degrading the rankings of the sites that “borrow” it. And if you are distributing press releases on your site, make sure you separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site and adding “nofollow” tags to all links to press releases.

You can read the other 9 negative factors here [3].  

I always try to also keep in mind that time spent in re-posting content which is already on the web is time not spent posting original content.   There is always a tug of war going on - discuss what someone else is discussing, or start a new conversation.