That doesn't seem strange at all to me. Some news stories come from 3rd party news agencies that sell the articles with non-exclusive rights. E.g. in Germany basically every local newspaper is built on top on articles sourced from dpa (Deutsche Presseagentur), and usually marked accordingly.

Of course there are also less reputable methods like just scraping articles from your competition.

Either way, it doesn't really _prove_ anything regarding it being a seeded PR piece, though my gut also tells me that it's likely.