Comments formatting and google news

My firend submitted his blog (www.sticksoffire.com) to Google News in an attempt to get it indexed in the news feeds. Google got back to him with a non-rejection type response… Saying they would be willing to index the site but formatting needs to be changed in order to do so.

Of the formatting requests (permalinsk and comments were what Google cited) it’s the comments that leave me most dumbfounded as to how to change them:

Furthermore, we’ve discovered that Google News would
> index your news
> articles together with your readers’ comments. In
> order to include your
> news content, we need to be able to crawl it without
> including reader
> comments and other non-news items.
>
> If you’re able to put all of your readers’ comments
> in one directory or
> folder, you can set up a robots.txt file to prevent
> Googlebot from
> accessing that folder. Alternatively, you can use a
> robots meta tag on
> each of your comments pages. If each reader comments
> page includes the
> appropriate meta tag, our crawler should ignore
> them.

I’m pretty sure there is a simple HTML/PHP way to edit the comment formatting besides the robots.txt option…?