Google, New York Times, Washington Post Team Up to Create Living Stories

By Ethan Lyon, Senior Writer

It was only last week that Google released “First Click Free,” a service that blocks avid users from taking advantage of Google to avoid pay walls. The move sought to strengthen Google’s historically tenuous relationship with the publishers. In another attempt to reconcile its relationship with mainstream media publishers, Google launched the Living Stories experiment. Google has partnered with The Washington Post and the New York Times to create Living Stories — a content aggregator specific to the publisher and topic.

Living Stories is a Google Lab experiment that ties together all major stories based on topic and publisher. Living Stories then organizes the topics in a timeline based on the most recently updated. For instance, “Washington Tackles Health Care Reform” is the topic presented by the Washington Post and was most recently updated an 31 minutes ago. Below it is the New York Times topic, “The Politics of Global Warming,” updated one hour ago.

When you click into a topic, you are directed to a co-branded page (Google and the publisher) that examines to topic even further. The top of the page summarizes the story and links in the sidebar outline common themes that you might want to explore. For instance, “Washington Tackles Health Care Reform” is divided into key events, people, images, etc. Furthermore, a timeline is assembled at below the summary — giving you highlights of the story.

One of the most exciting elements of this new lab is the updates. Google will close article summaries based on your viewing history. If you read “Senate rejects amendment on abortion,” only a headline will appear next time your visit. Moreover, if there is a development in the story, when you revisit the site it will be prominently displayed. This feature is inline with our Web Intelligence Trend — basically stating that the information we view on the web will become tailored to our browsing history.

This new feature is one of many attempts by newspapers and other media publishers, to stay relevant and reverse fate of their sinking ship. Google has historically been embroiled in conflicts with the media (think how Google Books violated a slew copyright laws). Afterall, New Co.’s leader Rupert Murdoch recently said, search engines are “feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others.”

“With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame,” writes Eric Schmidt in ironically, the WSJ. “Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.” Schmidt cites Google’s over 1 billion click referrals as a benefit of the search engine.

But can compromises — like Living Stories and First Click Free — by Google be enough to make an impact and save the spiraling print industry? “It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company, in a statement. “I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting.”

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