Google News is working hard to either kill your local newspaper or make you read it more often. While Google News has typically gathered the top stories from news sources across the web and presented the top world and national stories, you can now get local pages for pretty much any major city.
All you have to do is visit the Google News homepage, scroll down the page a bit until you see a box asking for a city, state, or zip code. Fill in the box, and Google will add a local section to the page. You can also click the hyperlink to get a standalone page. For example, this link takes you to a Google News for Chicago.
There’s no real local search tool yet. If you enter a search term from a local news page, you still get global search results.
[via Google Blogoscoped]