14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been experimenting with various ways for users to consume news stories that sway from the traditional approach and generally feel more native to the web rather than an application of the print model online. One interesting experiment was Living Stories, in which the company partnered with reputable publications the New York Times and Washington Post to test a fresh way of following a story, not by tracking down individual articles but by having one central place to get all the information. The experiment proved successful, so Google is now opening up the format to allow anyone to implement it.
The company doesn't have much of a fan base in the news industry and traditional newspapers and other media love nothing more than to blame the search engine, along with everyone else they can think of, for their troubles. Truth is, most do have all the reasons in the world to fear Google just as they would fear any change, which would make their business model and general way of doing things obsolete. The search giant has been making all sorts of peace offerings though, like Fast Flip, with varying degrees of success.
Living Stories proved to be one of the more popular experiments, which is why Google is now open-sourcing it and shutting down the Google Labs experiment.
"Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way," Neha Singh, software engineer, and Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google, wrote.
"In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it," they added.
Living Stories is a new approach to a news site, one that feels more at home in an online environment. Living Stories centers on, you guessed it, the story itself. There is a central page where everything having to do with that particular story gets aggregated. The page itself is designed to make it easier to see the whole picture at a glance. In the upper half of the page, there is a short general description of the piece followed by all the articles on the matter from that publication in reverse chronological order.
This made it much easier to follow the story, probably the reason 75 percent of those who tested Living Stories said it was a better approach to news than what websites had done until now. Google, of course, doesn't create any content itself, so it hasn't got much use for the tool. Various publishers, either traditional or entirely web-based, could put it to good use, which is why the company is now letting anyone take the code and implement it on their sites.