I need to be tracking “breaking” news regarding university/college and school closings. I use Apple News but I need something that will dig out more resources. I haven’t made a practice of using RSS but that may be my best option. I need something to ferret out news stories from criteria that I have set.
Ideally, I don’t want to pay a subscription–let’s not go there on this thread. 
Any suggestions?
A well-tunes Google Search Alert would probably work, albeit I’m sure you’d get a lot of repeat or redundant stories.
For some reason I thought that Google had done away with that service several years ago. I must have misunderstood what they stopped supporting. That said, I think you are right, I’ll probably get a lot of noise.
Learn to use google’s operators. If looking for recent covid-19 news for Oklahoma, for example, I’d enter this in Google:
(inurl:ok | inurl:Oklahoma) (intitle:coronavirus | intitle:”covid 19″ | intitle:”covid19″ | intitle:”covid-19″)
and then I’d use Tools to restrict results to the last hour or 24 hours.
You can even use these operators in Google Alerts.
You can also typically take a feed from such an Alert and put it through a filtering service. I think most of the major RSS services offer keyword and even machine learning-based smart filtering.