Behind Your Business

Google Labs has launched an innovative news-reporting experiment in partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post. Called Living Stories, the venture aggregates related content on specific news topics onto dedicated web pages that are continuously updated.

"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," wrote Google software engineer Neha Singh and senior business product manager Josh Cohen in a recent blog post.

Exploiting the Web's Advantages

At the top of each Living Story is an evolving summary of the latest news developments, with the latest updates highlighted each time the reader comes back to the same page. The summary is immediately followed by an interactive timeline of critical events; further down, readers can explore stories by themes, significant participants, and multimedia.

With Living Stories, everything related to an individual news topic resides on the main page. To view full articles or browse multimedia content, the reader clicks to expand the content he or she wants to view. Readers can also click to minimize any materials already seen.

Having a dedicated URL for each story topic enables readers to quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces, and features without long waits for pages to load. In this respect, Google's experimental approach appears particularly well suited for use on wireless e-readers and other portable computing devices.

"The power of Living Stories would be useful to readers on any wireless device, including e-readers as well as mobile phones," said James McQuivey, a Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst. "Neither device is particularly good at enabling the hunt-and-peck process people have to go through to search for news stories."

Keeping Consumers Engaged

Many traditional publishers have long complained about the negative impact the web...