This one is a good effort. It’s a combination of Google, New York Times and the Washington Post coming together to create a topic based ‘living story’.
They have an example using The Afghanistan War as the topic and it works quite well. It isn’t really as snazzy as the name ‘Living Stories’ would suggest – However, it’s definitely a good effort.
Google says its based around three key ideas -
- Full story in one place.
- Easy to explore the story in depth.
- Smarter reading through personalization.
However, the two big things, in my opinion, are -
- It’s topic based – niche and customer intent are key on the Internet and Living Stories addresses this. It’s very similar to Topix and Mahalo.
- It takes two quality content creators and lets them address the content and Google augments content with its technology. Everyone’s sticking to their core competency.
This is the closest we have come to a real solution for making news relevant. Wonder why Google won’t talk about intentions.
The flaw in this is that there is no path to monetization – because of the context.
Both the Internet and Google train people to expect Free
Consider all the things that the Internet and Google offer for free -
- Free Information.
- Free Content.
- Free Services.
- Free GPS.
- Free Maps.
- Wikipedia
- Craigslist.
There are so many free products and services that it’s worth considering the opposite – What do people pay for?
Consider that question and you have to wonder how News is expected to buck the trend and become the first product associated with the Internet and Google that people pay for.
Living Stories might improve news – how is it going to save it?
Yes, it’s a good storyline – you now have videos and comments and timelines all on one page. You can embed comments across the net.
It’s got a fancy name and it’s got 3 goals behind it and it’s personalized.
At the core though – it’s Content that used to be free – now packaged into topics and made interactive to a certain extent.
Is that enough to convince people to pay for it?
Danny Sullivan and the Vision behind Google Living Stories
Danny Sullivan explains exactly what Google is trying to do.
- Google has this concept of a living URL – something that updates itself and provides a great place to find information. It’s like a Wikipedia page for a news topic.
- The second part of Google’s vision is ‘read state’ i.e. what do people already know and what would be fresh news for them.
In some ways this is a very search centric view of things. It’s also an attempt to create a format of news that an algorithm and content partners and free volunteers can sustain.
Josh Cohen of Google heads Living Stories and he even points out the embedded search focus -
Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, said that having all the material appear on a single page would help the page rank higher in Internet searches than newspapers’ subject pages do now.
At its core its an attempt to make it easy to figure out what the latest news is – both for search engines and for users, and an attempt to do it with minimal effort.
It’s the minimal effort part that doesn’t make sense -
Shouldn’t we focus on making news better and getting people to pay for it rather than making it cheaper to produce and giving it away free?
If Living Stories succeed Google will let news sites use it for free
Google says it has certain criteria for success in mind and if Living Stories works -
- The news topic pages will move from Google Labs to Washington Post and New York Times domains.
- Google will let news sites use Google Living Stories and even run ads against these pages.
It’s interesting to see Google make so many attempts at improving news. We’ve had Google News timeline, FastFlip, and now Living Stories.
There is an undercurrent of efficiency in all these efforts that is a bit curious i.e. Are Google trying to make news better or are they just trying to make it less expensive?
Living Stories is not really a user feature
My initial thoughts were that this is a good experiment.
However, it’s so search centric and so focused on minimizing effort on the part of the newspapers and Google that you have to wonder what the aim is.
Has anyone sat down and thought at length about what news really is and what purpose news and newspapers serve?
The living URL and read state concepts are very search and news provider centric concepts. There’s not much user focus.
Could Living Stories be better than current news formats – Perhaps.
Is it something that will serve users very well? That would be a bit of a miracle because it doesn’t seem to have been made with users in mind.
Filed under: publishing Tagged: | future of newspapers
