[Infowarrior] - Google teams with Post, N.Y. Times to create online tool

[Richard Forno]

Google teams with Post, N.Y. Times to create online tool
'Living story' pages aim to change how news is consumed on the Web
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 1:26 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120802319_pf.html
Take the engineering mystique of Google, add the prestige of The  
Washington Post and New York Times, throw in the spice of secret  
meetings, and what have you got?

A new online tool that, well, isn't exactly going to revolutionize  
journalism. But those involved in the partnership between the  
California software giant and two of the nation's top newspapers see  
it as a first step toward changing the way news is consumed online.

It's called a living story page, and Google executives are touting it  
as their contribution to the beleaguered newspaper business. The idea  
is to simplify things for readers by grouping developing stories about  
a hot topic -- say, Tiger Woods -- on a single Web page, with updates  
automatically highlighted at the top of the screen.

"So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it's  
told in newspapers," says Josh Cohen, senior business product manager  
for Google News. "They haven't taken advantage of what the Web offers  
to tell news in a different way."

By grouping the stories day after day under one Web address, the Times  
and Post could boost their Google rankings, which would tend to push  
those pages toward the top of the list when people search for that  
subject. After the Tuesday launch, the story pages will reside at  
Google Labs for an experimental period of two to three months, and  
revert to the papers' own Web sites if all goes well.

"Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your  
feedback," Google says in a blog posting. If the new format gets  
traction, Google plans to offer it to any interested newspaper,  
magazine or Web site, at no charge.

For now, The Post is launching three such pages, on health-care  
reform, D.C. schools and the Washington Redskins. The Times has five,  
devoted to Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, swine  
flu and health care.

R.B. Brenner, deputy editor of The Post's new Universal Desk, which  
oversees its print and Web operations, says the "one-stop shopping"  
approach could spare readers from having to hunt for previous stories  
on a subject. "The idea is that users, news consumers, are interested  
in experiencing news in different ways, and it's important for news  
organizations to be experimenting. . . . The question is, when you  
take the car out for a spin, what are the advantages?"

The confidential meetings, which began last spring, grew out of  
conversations between Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, and  
Donald Graham, The Post Co.'s chief executive. Google later began  
separate discussions with senior Times executives.

The initiative comes as some media executives, led by Rupert Murdoch,  
are blaming Google for grabbing their content without charge at a time  
when newspapers are struggling to generate enough revenue to support  
their newsrooms. A generation of Web surfers has grown up searching  
for individual stories rather than visiting major media portals.

"Google is a great source of promotion," Schmidt wrote last week in a  
Wall Street Journal opinion piece. "We send online news publishers a  
billion clicks a month from Google News and more than 3 billion extra  
visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. The  
claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also  
misrepresents the reality."

For a company that invented Google Maps and Gmail, the living story  
pages lack technological bells and whistles, although multimedia  
elements could be added later. Topic pages, which collect a media  
outlet's work on specific subject, already exist at the Times and at  
such aggregation sites as the Huffington Post.

Readers of each story page can click on a list of themes, such as  
"test scores," "labor issues" or "the racial divide" on The Post's  
D.C. schools page. Other choices include "events," "articles,"  
"images," "videos," "graphics" and "opinion." A timeline of key  
developments appears near the top. Stories deemed by editors to be  
more important get bigger play, perhaps with a photo. Readers can  
choose to display a list of stories with the latest or oldest at the  
top. When they return to a page, new material since their last visit  
is highlighted. And clicking on certain words within an article causes  
small boxes -- such as a picture and brief bio of D.C. Schools  
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee -- to pop up.

One advantage of collecting pieces on the same page is that many  
paragraphs of background material -- needed in a daily paper because  
editors don't know who has read the earlier stories -- can be  
eliminated. But Post editors are concerned that the overall process  
could eat up valuable staff time unless it is made more automated.

During the process a half-dozen Google staffers spent three days in  
the Post newsroom in May, trailing editors and reporters with notepads  
and video cameras like some archeological expedition. "The culture of  
Google is a culture of engineers," Brenner says. "We exist in  
different worlds."