At long last, Google News has enabled RSS feeds on news searches.

Now, suddenly, Google’s e-mailed news alerts are just so five queries ago. You want to keep on top of news coverage of a particular subject? Say, the name of your organization, or its spokesperson, or your chief rival for the love of another?

1. Navigate to Google News.
2. Enter the search terms you’d like to monitor, and click “Search”.
3. Check out the results, refining your search terms if necessary until you’re satisfied with them.
4. Click on “Sort by date” in the upper right hand corner.
5. Right-click on the word “RSS” or “Atom” in the left-hand sidebar, under the colored navigation links to various flavours of news.
6. Copy the link location.
7. Open up your favourite RSS newsreader, and paste the link location into a new subscription. Repeat from step 1 as necessary.

(If that last sentence sounded like Geordi La Forge‘s latest excuse for not being able to get the Enterprise to go to warp, beam over to Alex’s RSStocracy site for a quick indoctrination in all things syndication-y.)

Voila: your own free-of-charge custom media monitoring command post. Thank you, Google.