It's alive! What is a living story?
Last May, a Google VP was called to testify before a US Senate communications committee on the future of journalism. Marissa Mayer explained that Google’s role is to drive traffic from searches to online news publishers. She called Google “a conduit for online publishing”, said that the future of news consumption lay in the “atomic unit”, and then proposed something called “the living story”.
The first idea is terrible. Ms Mayer compares online news to digital music. The iTunes Music store has made buying whole albums a thing of the past. News, Ms Mayer said, is going through that same process. People are more used to arriving at single articles through a Google search rather than reading full newspapers. There is flaw in this argument. The value of an article decreases with time at a rate faster than that of music. You might pay £2 for a song that you will listen to many times. Who reads the same news article more than once? Now tell me what you think about Axel Springer – the German publishers of Bild – arguing that their online readers would pay €5 to see pictures of Berlusconi hanging out with a bunch of prostitutes.
Articles published online are almost never updated. There could be several reasons for this. Journalists write the first draft of history. It is important to have a historical record of events and to be able to trace their progression over time. A more likely explanation is that it is a hangup from the days of print-only publishing. Enter living stories (sometimes incorrectly called living URLs).
The idea is that a story can evolve on a single Web page. News stories will look more like Wikipedia articles and The New York Time’s topic pages. “The result,” says Ms Mayer, “is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.” Wait, I know what that is. It’s a newspaper.
Well, it’s more than a newspaper. Rather, it’s what online news publishers can be. Have a look at Google’s Principles of Living Stories. A clean separation between the story summary and story developments eliminates the needless repetition of content in current publishing as a story develops over days or weeks.
Yesterday, Google launched their Living Stories Prototype. The first thing you’ll notice is that it looks terrible. The second is that this is not like Google’s ordinary news aggregation that sorts very similar articles from different publishers into “stories”. Instead, each living story only collects articles from one publication. For now, those are The Washington Post and The New York Times, which have collaborated with Google on this technology. From the Google Blog:
This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We’re providing the technology platform, the Times and Post’s journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we’re continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision.
This kind of collaboration is what publishing really needs. It turns out that Google sees itself as more than just a conduit.
