Google News is most definitely trainable. NO WAY would I visit Reddit for news (I was an early adopter of Reddit, and with Hacker News in my portfolio of news sources already, I don't see enough value-add in trying Reddit again.)

It has gotten harder to train Google news due to the big uptick in the 300 word reprint practice that is playing out in media recently. Even if you manually block all the major outlets, so many sites reprint their stories that I still end up with Miley Cyrus news in my feed.

How do you do that? The only way I can think is discarding any story I'm not interested in, but how do I say, hey Google Now I liked this article?

+1?

Or how do I say: "this was a really bad article"?

Here is a Ted talk (2011) by Eli Pariser [1] about the "filter bubble" and its unintended consequences.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...