Wouldn't it be better for newspapers to build robust, genuinely useful personalization systems for their home pages? That would all but eliminate the need for things like Google news -- at least in local markets. It might even make news websites worth paying for...
Note that Google says its news page is built by a mathematical algorithm, based on the position of stories on sites elsewhere on the Web. And it is human editors that choose and place the stories that Google's robots find.
Google hasn't replaced human editors with machines. Its merely replaced the flunkies who go rip-and-read the top stories from the daily paper. Don't get too worried.
