Mountain View, California — After delivering traffic since its launch in December, Google is bestowing new life to “Living Stories,” the news research project that it began experimenting with the New York Times and the Washington Post will now be publicly available to provide a deeper user engagement.
One of the major concept behind the “Living Stories” project is, rather than re-publishing the whole over and over every time there is a new development in any current story, a newspaper simply continues with a single “living story” and updates it with new pieces of information. Sort of like a Wikipedia article, except edited by in-house staff only.
For the past two months, the New York Times and the Washington Post have been examining the idea, creating living stories for subjects like the war in Afghanistan and executive compensation (at the Times) and the Washington Redskins’ season and the overhaul of the D.C. school system (at the Post).
Now moving a step further towards creating better relations with news publishers, Google today announced that it will make its Living Stories project available to news outlets globally by making it an open source, which will boasts a summary of recent developments related to a news topic, along with a timeline, on a single page — so that any publisher can adopt it.
“Living Stories” previously was only available in Google Labs and featured a limited number of pages created by the NYTimes and Washington Post. Now, as ‘living stories’ becomes publicly available, which programmers at other organizations must implement and customize on their own. Google says it is also working on a software version, which presumably would be easier to use.
“75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article,” software engineer Neha Singh and senior business product manager Josh Cohen wrote on the Google News blog. “Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there is a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.”
“We look forward to working with developers and journalists to explore how we can function together on Living Stories. We are keen on seeking out new innovative ways for news publishers to deliver content and find online readers, and this is one of many efforts we are working on in that direction,” said Google’s print content partnerships director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Santiago de la Mora.
A Google spokesperson Oliver Rickman, said that the company has been “very much delighted” with response to the product, noting that on average users spent nine minutes on each story and that the vast majority of users who filled out feedback forms said that they preferred the “Living Stories” format to traditional online news articles.
However, with Living Stories Google attempts to expand it to a next level as now it also provides a way of engaging the user. “If you have the traffic, what do you do with it? Focus on engagement,” de la Mora describes the approach.
“The experiment with Living Stories, the New York Times and the Washington Post yielded good results, so we are excited to be able to offer this technology more broadly,” he said.
This reflects that readers enjoy the concept of Living Stories could be consistent with emerging data that indicates that people reading online information have different habits than newspaper readers of yore.
Can we expect further news experiments from Google? “Yes,” responded de la Mora, adding, more evasively: “We try to be robust contributors to news organizations on the technology side.”