They are referring to news snippets that show up in Google Search (not the Google News app on your phone). Those are one of the most significant sources of traffic for publishers.
Even for a web search, Google News doesn't show snippets at all anymore, just headlines and thumbnails. (This is in the "Top Stories" widget and on the "News" tab.)
It looks like the snippet is still there for generic web results, but that's further down the page for a news search and probably not a big driver of traffic.
