simple,
The value is in the increased audience pool it provides.
Syndicating your website is like providing a distribution network for your content. Enabling feed readers to easily notify subscribers of new contents.
I have a couple of websites/blog i read on a regular basis. But can you imagine the inconvenience of having to manually type url of each site (that is if i remember all of them) to see if there are new contents? I don't because I've subscribed to their rss feeds so i just check my feeds, and if there is any new content I'm promptly taken to the website/blog.
And also the distribution network is not limited to readers who personally subscribe to feeds. There are news aggregating websites that takes feeds from sources and present to readers in one convenient place. Or how do you think a site like google news gets its content from? Or Cnet? Even BBC presents feeds from external sources.
So for Thisday news site, syndicating, apart from making it easier for user to get fresh content they are setting themselves up for more visitors; you never can tell, if google finds the news there good enough and updated regularly they might decide to pick on it as the source for news coming from Nigeria. Or do you think they have the time to be manually scurrying for news content on your site to put on google news?
And if they are adventurous enough they might want to see it as a source of funds generation. See
http://www.pheedo.com/ for more on that.