XML News benefits

Once all the stories were in XML and the tools were working, you can pull apart any document and do what you like to it. Once we'd sorted out the generation of XHTML from XML, getting WAP took only an hour or so, and about the same for the RSS feed
Once you've got going with XML it gets easier and easier to put together new apps using old bits of code (code reuse finally!)
Client side processing is a non-starter as there are always bits of XML that you need to hide from the public (the news for example contains embargo dates)