Google News was once a decent resource for catching up with the news in the morning or when something interesting happened. It was concise, usable, and you were able—at a single glance—to get a clue as to what might be important.

All that is gone. A recent upgrade ends any "at a glance" value, with stories organized by what the company calls a "card format." This means you must click on the card in the white space to expand it into something useful.

According to the Google blog, "Videos have become central to news storytelling." Except for the Washington Post and the New York Times—which both dominate the pages I see—the posts most often contain some sort of lame video report. Thus, CNN crops up a lot.

I personally do not see a great variety of alternate, first-class papers on this page. I've been following this redesign for over a week and missing in action is the Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate, and the Los Angeles Times. These papers and dozens more do employ actual reporters who do actual reporting. Are they chopped liver?

Google has various mechanisms to customize your feed, so if you do not like the Times or Washington Post, you can block them from cropping up in Google News. But why are they or other "pay wall" papers there in the first place?

The New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal all have paywalls. As Bloomberg noted in June, Google has a "first click free" policy, meaning those on Google can read at least one free article from most subscription-based papers during a set period of time before hitting a paywall. That keeps those papers from taking a hit in Google's search results, something the Journal experienced when it stopped providing free articles to Google News entirely in February, according to Bloomberg.

Personally, I'd prefer the diversity of local outlets over the New York Times and the Washington Post, which seem to hog the top three Google News spots.

My wife complained to me bitterly about the recent Google News overhaul. She discovered that by typing a topic into the regular Google search box then clicking "news" on the line below, you get a page resembling the old Google News. For something totally unslanted, type in "headlines today" then click on "news" to get a rather alien list of sites all doing news rundowns that are all better designed than Google.

Google says its redesign was intended to "make news more accessible and easier to navigate...with a renewed focus on facts, diverse perspectives, and more control for users." Call me old-fashioned, but it seems more like change for the sake of change, a huge problem on the internet that I don't see changing any time soon.