Google News has posted a bunch of new help pages that explain what content is indexed in the site and why. Google has promised they would be more transparent about who gets enshrined.
The notable entries in the help pages cover RSS (they don't crawl feeds, only pages), the inclusion of press releases and images, and news sources in Google Finance.
Unfortunately, these don't go far enough. It's still unclear why some blogs - like Om Malik's Gigaom - are in and others, like TechCrunch, are out. Maybe they should set up a special private ping server now that they have one for blogs.
