Google RSS Reader was my defacto, for exactly this purpose. Some were direct feeds from NYT, TechCrunch, etc but many were simply, the topic searches and RSS feed obtained from those. I miss those days.

Google News does allow you some personalization. But, I am big fan of river of news concept (Dave Winer). There are many solutions still, but I am limiting my media consumption and hacker news and couple of other sites faily satisfy the need.