deadsea - 10:54 pm on Dec 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

I was worried a while ago because a network of about 40 adult sites linked to my site from one templated page that was on each of the 40 sites. Nothing bad ever came of it.

If some sort of "unnatural linking" penalty does come your way, you can always disavow the links using Google's tool for doing so.

I highly doubt that it will cause a problem. These links should pass every smell test that Google could throw at them. They are curated. They are meant to be useful to users. Users actually click on them. The is no exchange of any sort (links or money). They are with the content rather than in a sidebar or footer. There are many from the same site, but a single link isn't site-wide. If the site is like the news sites that I visit, the links probably fall off the front page and pass very little pagerank soon after they are put on the site.

You didn't say what the anchor text is, but my guess is that it isn't going to be problematic either. This would be the only remaining reason to worry. If the site is linking to your content using only the keywords that are likely to be searched for. If they are linking using your site name, then there is really no need to worry in this regard. If they are linking using your article titles, then when you write future articles, be sure not to keyword stuff them.