I just did a (very quick) check and – at least here in Germany – the carousel brings up all kinds of sites that one would not consider traditional news outlets,

I just did a (very quick) check and – at least here in Germany – the carousel brings up all kinds of sites that one would not consider traditional news outlets, e.g. mobiflip.de, stadt-bremerhaven.de and lostineu.eu. It also shows the more traditional (but also pretty new) news site watson.de, which launched in March 2018. I feel like it's not really hard to be generally approved by Google. What I know from my daily business: You have almost no chance in beating traditional media when it comes to really popular news topics like "Angela Merkel" or "Brexit".