Reinventing The Printing Press? Not Quite

Announcements of new Google products and initiatives pop out about as often as word of layoffs in the newspaper industry — that is, just about every day.

The search giant has been in a battle with some in that dying industry, including media titan Rupert Murdoch (whose print holdings include The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and the New York Post), about paying for content that is linked from Google News.

Earlier this month, in an effort to address some of those concerns, Google said it would make it easier for publishers to limit the number of free clicks to stories linked from Google News, or to block their content from the news aggregator altogether.

Google insists it's on the news industry's side.

On that front, Google's latest gee-whiz announcement could represent the shape of things to come (but then, don't they all...). Google has collaborated with The Washington Post and The New York Times on a "living stories" project. The idea is to present ongoing stories in layers of depth while moving away from the traditional inverted pyramid, with the latest news first, followed by information of lesser importance. The new approach allows readers to dive quickly and directly into an aspect of the story that may either be new (or at least new to them).

As a Google News blog post explains:

Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. 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.

For example, a Times story page on the health care debate, leads with a brief summary, followed by a timeline, then sections dividing the story into types of content (articles, people, quotes, graphics, opinion). Readers can view the latest information first, or flip it around and see the story unfold chronologically.

Whether this approach will work for all readers (folks brought up on newspapers may find it jarring) or for all publications (Google says it plans to "work on open-source tools for creating Living Stories that any news organization can use") remains to be seen. But this hints at one possible future.