Syndication partner ranking in Google News for our content

[CarsProduction]

Our blog is part of Google News and is syndicated for use by several of our partners such as Chicago Tribune. Lately, we see the syndicator version of the post appearing in Google News instead of our original version. Ours generally ranks in the regular index. ChiTrib does have canonical URL tags and syndication-source tags pointing to our original. They are meta tags, not link tags.

We do have a News-specific sitemap that is being reported in WMT as error-free. However, it shows no urls indexed in the News module -- even when I can find those specific URLs (our version) in the News.

For an example: Here is a ChiTrib post currently ranking in Google News
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/sns-school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone-20120301,0,3514283.story

The original version is here:
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/03/school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone.html

The News sitemap URL is
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/kickingtires_newsmap.xml

One of our front-end producers is speculating that the Facebook sharing code on ChiTrib is having an effect. Given that FB is FB and Google is Google, that sounds wrong to me when we're talking about specifically Google News.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Syed1]

We had offers from a quite a few well reputed News sources to syndicate our content but we declined those for exactly this reason.

These media sites are usually of very high authority and there is nothing much you can do about as of now to prove that you are the original source of the content as Google unfortunately still allows higher authority sites to outrank the original provider. I believe Google Authorship will reduce this issue to a good extent but right now if you don't want them to outrank you, just don't let them syndicate.