Via the MediaBistro mailing list, I saw a link to this story on C|NET that Google is beta testing a News Alerts program:
People can subscribe to the test Google News Alerts by providing keywords that are related to stories that they would like to receive and their e-mail address at the sign-up page. People can limit their alerts by source and choose to receive them once a day or continuously, as Google crawls the Web. There is a limit of 50 keywords per e-mail address.
The test launch comes a couple of weeks after Google refined its daily news search tools. It now allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication. People can use it retrieve articles from more than 4,500 news outlets on the Web. […]
I already use Google News as my primary news source and I’m looking forward to trying this. If their setup allows it, I may even try subscribing my cell phone to their News Alerts.