A new version of Google News is out.

It is still listed as beta code, and it has some neat improvements. But it's still skewing the news business in dangerous directions.

First the good news. Google News now has cookie-based customization (if you have multiple browsers you need to customize it separately for each). This means you can create your own headline term, like WiFi, and have its stories appear on your Google News page. You can also get rid of existing Google News headings (except for the two top stories).

You can change these settings on the fly, getting your World headlines from, say, the French Canadian version of the site, or changing the name of a custom heading (the Always On heading becomes a search for WiFi stories).

But you are still subject to Google's rules about what is and what is not a news story.

And on Google News a news story is something that appears in the Main Stream Media (MSM), nowhere else.

In some ways this is a welcome change. During last year's political campaign I was often frustrated by how right-wing opinion sites like Talon News consistently snuck into the Google News headlines, while liberal opinion was consigned outside, because those sites used blog software.

Now, some real media connection is necessary to get your stories into Google News. The one non-MSM story I found today on the keyword "Howard Dean," for instance, was in BlackAmericaWeb, which turns out to based on the Tom Joyner radio show.

In other words, getting your stories listed in Google News seems to require some non-Web presence, one aimed at making a profit. Or does it?

The definition means this item won't be listed in Google News. Neither will anything else Corante publishes, because Corante is a Web-based publisher.

On the other hand items I write for ZDNet, such as this one on the GPL, do get picked up, often with pictures attached. ZDNet, and C|Net, however, are Web-only publishers.

The question is, why them and not us? (Although in this case I must admit to being both them and us.) It's an editorial decision that Google is making.

It may be defensible, but their standards are not transparent. Corante offers custom news feeds for its clients, and all its blogs are created based on a high level of expertise and journalistic common sense. They deserve to be accessible via Google News, not just the main search engine.

If Google disagrees, fine. But they should tell us why. And they should publish their standards for listing the content of sites. That way, at least, we know what we're getting, and not getting, and why