newsmap gives you a neat flashy view of google news.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

my hint: select the categories of news you want and then bookmark the permalink. maybe that is obvious but i didn’t pick up on it for quite a while.