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Google teams with NYT, WaPo on novel news format
In the great Internet blame game that has settled in as a sturdy subplot to the story of the decline of newspapers ....
In the great Internet blame game that has settled in as a sturdy subplot to the story of the decline of newspapers, Eric Schmidt is on the short list of bad guys right up there with Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington.
Schmidt, the CEO of Google, has addressed the subject in public remarks on several occasions this year. He has said that publishers will likely have to begin charging for content, but, generally, his advice to the legacy media has been to innovate your way out of the current decline -- do more with data, customized news presentation, better ads -- you know, the stuff Google's really good at.
Schmidt and other Googlers have been meeting with news organizations for some time to develop new models for digital news, and the Web giant today unveiled the first product to emerge from those partnerships.
Well, not a product, exactly. Living Stories, a dynamic, unified model for presenting information that would be scatted across several news stories on a subject in the traditional print model, made its public debut today as an experiment in Google Labs, with the New York Times and Washington Post as inaugural partners.
"Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing," Neha Singh, a Google software engineer, and Senior Business Product Manager Josh Cohen wrote in a blog post.
"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," they explained.
The idea is to reinvent the format of the newspaper story to keep pace with the ways people are getting their news online. Newspaper sites, though they have been experimenting with features like video, blogs and Web chats, still generally present articles about a particular subject in silos, largely as they were written for the print product. The result is a considerable degree of redundancy, where many of the same facts are rehashed in each article.
Articles are still available in their complete format through Living Stories, but a set of reportage like, say, the Times' coverage of the war in Afghanistan, is presented at a glance, with a timeline of major events full of links, video and brief synopses of the biggest stories.
Living Stories is today just a prototype. Google said it is looking for feedback and will continue to develop the feature, with the goal of eventually making it available for any news organization to deploy on its site.
