I've been looking for a similar product, but have yet to find one. Some of the major news sites have proprietary software to install, but even after configuring, what they deem "news" and what I deem "news" are two VERY different things.

I've been thinking for a while about writing a news utility that would basically scrape the major web sites for news and post it as a ticker in the task bar or window. I could whip this thing together in a few hours. If you have any ideas about features you'd want, post them.

And yes, it'd be freeware ;)