A news sitemap is a specialized XML sitemap, following Google News' own specification, that lists a publisher's recently published articles along with metadata like publication date, title, and keywords. Because news value decays within hours rather than months, the format exists specifically to get fresh articles crawled and indexed as fast as possible rather than waiting on a normal crawl cycle.
It's meant only for genuinely time-sensitive news content published within the last two days, not a general-purpose sitemap for a site's entire archive, and Google's own guidelines cap it at 1,000 URLs to keep it focused on what's actually current. Sites that publish frequent, timely content, news outlets, but also blogs covering fast-moving topics, benefit most from having one, since it's the most direct channel to Google News specifically, on top of whatever benefit the regular crawl and standard sitemap already provide.
