Mountain View, California — Search engine giant Google, whose controversial news aggregation service Google News, which has recently drawn the ire of news publisher, is teaming up with The Washington Post and The New York Times to create a new online tool that is designed to rank articles on major news stories as they develop. The feature, named as Living Stories, is intended to offer a diverse online news experience by creating a singular page where readers can follow one story line in the news as new developments occur.
“The concept behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online,” Neha Singh, software engineer, and Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google, wrote in a blog post.
“We are thrilled to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them,” they said.
If everything moves as proposed, Google mentioned that the aim is to shift from the traditional “inverted pyramid” model employed in newspaper stories that places the most important or recent piece of news up top. If it works well, the feature could be introduced to all publishers and sit on any of their Web sites to prioritize hot news stories and new information about anything from a climate summit to the Tiger Woods car accident.
“Living Stories takes a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing,” Singh and Cohen wrote. “Through a concise summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.”
Living Stories groups reporting of a particular subject matter from a news organization under a single URL, or Web address.
The New York Times’ reporting of the war in Afghanistan, for instance, is presented on a single Web page with links to news articles, opinion columns, photos, video, graphics and other material.
The page includes a summary of important developments with links to Times stories, a timeline of significant events, profiles of important players and links to archived stories such as coverage of the recent Afghan elections.
“A regular newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance,” says Google. “Information from earlier reporting is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories makes a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.”
Singh and Cohen said this reasoning contributed to an experiment with news demonstration that produced in the Living Stories prototype.
Users can sign up for e-mail alerts that will go out when a given page is updated. They can also select how they prefer to view the articles on the page — by “most important,” “newest first” or “oldest first” — and scroll up or down through a list of stories.
“News organizations create abundance of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows,” wrote Singh and Cohen.
“We are providing the technology platform, the Times and Post’s journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we are continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision,” Singh and Cohen wrote.
The unveiling of “Living Stories” comes amid criticism of Google in some quarters by US newspaper publishers over its news aggregation system, particularly News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has accused the company of profiting from his content without sharing advertising revenue.
This new project, however, could expand upon what publishers could do on their own sites.
Being a Google Labs experiment, there is plenty of room for improvement with Living Stories. Google is encouraging readers and news organizations for feedback on the project, which is coming out of Google Labs, where the company incubates new products and projects.
Living Stories are currently only available in English, and are not designed to necessarily support mobile devices yet.