Duplicate Content in News Section

[rise1]

Our clients site is in the hunting niche.  According to webmaster tools there are over 32,000 indexed pages.  In the new section that are 300-400 news posts where over the course of a about 5 years they manually copied relevant  Press Releases from different state natural resources websites (ex. http://gfp.sd.gov/news/default.aspx).  This content is relevant to the site visitors but it is not unique.

We have since begun posting unique new posts but I am wondering if anything should be done with these old news posts that aren't unique?  Should I use the rel="canonical tag or noindex tag for each of these pages?  Or do you have another suggestion?

[irvingw]

If they don't get much organic traffic, the noindex tag is the best way to go. Otherwise,I would leave them alone - the percentage is so small to the overall site that it wouldn't make a remarkable difference by leaving them. The canonical tag should only be used when pages have similar or duplicate data.

[rise1]

Thanks Irving.  I miscounted there are about 900 news posts.

Some of them do get a fair amount of traffic but most don't get any traffic.  Would it be ok to add the noindex tag to those that don't get any traffic and leave those that do alone?

[SEODinosaur]

I would "noindex" everything but your categories on a blog/news site.