If your client publishes news articles on their sites written and produced by others, is it worth optimising this content for SERP`s?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Lidia van Wyk: Hi. If your client publishes news articles on their sites written and produced by others, is it worth optimising this content for SERP's?
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  Collin Davis: Well as much as possible, you should try to have original content on your website. Mention the source of the article always in your posts so that search engines understand that you are at least attributing it and not stealing.
  
  Is optimizing this content worth it? Absolutely! Most news articles are timebound. If you optimize them well enough with news sitemaps and schema then the chances of them appearing in Google News and Bing News is higher which can help drive referral traffic...
  
  If the original source doesn't do this ; and you do, there is every likelihood that you may feature ahead of them and thus gain on the traffic...
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  Lidia van Wyk: Thanks Collin. That helps a lot.
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  Rahul Gemawath: Incase you have duplicate content try using rel=canonical 
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  Honey Tree Media: Hi Lidia, is this syndicated content that your client purchased? What do the original publishes content usage guidelines say?
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  Lidia van Wyk: Yes. This is syndicated content. Press releases that were distributed to them. They are allowed to publish these articles. I'm just trying to weigh up the options of whether it's worth the time, energy and effort to focus on this from an SEO perspective.
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  Gerk Mulder: In that case definitely use the rel=canonical +Rahul Gemawathmentioned, towards the original source, you don't want Google to think you're a copycat/contentscraper