Google teams with newspapers for “Living Stories”
Google is testing a project to blend its own technology with the reporting skills of major newspapers. The idea is to create “Living Stories”, a central page which brings together all of a publication’s coverage on a single running story.
For the moment, the experiment is being carried out with the New York Times and Washington Post. If successful, the technology will be made open source and available to any publication which wants to use it.
Each of the eight stories in the experiment has a home page which will remain at the same URL, meaning it can easily be bookmarked. The page contains a summary of the overall story, two timelines of events (one a straight list, one a scrollable graphic), and then a list of articles from the newspaper with the introduction shown by default, each expandable to show the full text.
There is also a sidebar with links to other types of information (similar to the sidebars in main Google searches) such as images, quotes and bios of the main people in the story.
As well as a comments section for the page itself, there’s also an interactive graphic which contains the comments section from the original publication of various key articles in the newspaper.
The big question, which isn’t addressed by Google in its explanation, is what happens with advertising. In the experiment itself, there is no advertising. However, the finished version is designed to be hosted by publications on their own site. It remains to be seen whether the newspaper will be able to customize the page to include adverts, whether Google will insert its own adverts, and whether there’ll be any revenue-sharing deals.
The Post notes another benefit for newspapers taking up the scheme: grouping multiple stories together at a single site will likely boost its standing in Google’s rankings, making it more likely the newspaper or magazine will attract visitors searching for information on a general topic in a way that wouldn’t happen with a single, focused article.
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