The article mentions headlines and short excerpts. I'm not sure how long the excerpts in question are, but good news journalism conveys the key facts of the story in the first paragraph. Newswires marketing themselves as providing "business intelligence" often keep at least the most recent headlines behind the paywall because the headlines themselves constitute the a large proportion of the value to subscribers. Although they're an aggregator rather than a content-provider, this is one of the markets that Meltwater compete in. Moreover they're charging a not-inexpensive fee for access to the service, and competing to a certain extent with subscription aggregators like Factiva and Nexis that do pay licence fees to the content providers for all results referred.

Of course, I'm also not ruling out the possibility they're shooting themselves in the foot here and Meltwater users happily click through to read full content in a large proportion of searches and (directly or indirectly) pay licensing fees. I doubt the very public spat with Google News and paywall erection strategy for the Times is working for News International http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85340078-e660-11df-95f9-00144feab4... http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005...

The UK courts have long supported copyright trolls who claim ownership of widely-established facts like the football fixture list without there being any wider ramifications for free dissemination of information, so I wouldn't read too much into it.