Well at least somebody's watching Google News! NewsKnife tracks Google News and compares their top stories with the leading stories from some major news sites such as CNN and Yahoo! News. The goal seems to be to determine how close Google News can come to these established sources.
I'm glad someone's doing such tracking, but I'm not particularly down with the interpretation. Roughly speaking, Google News seems to be getting about 2/3 of the same stories. Great if you want the same-old, same-old, but Google News' real utility is bringing to light more of the news mix out there. Expanding the horizon if you will. The Google News guys say that the service is "not edited by a human", but they've never claimed that it will "edit as well as a human."