Yesterday, the Google News team announced the beta launch of Living Stories, a platform that aims to provide a new way for users to consume news. The prototype blends Google technology with content from the Washington Post and New York Times.
According to Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager at Google News, “The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online.”
Being a Redskins fan (nowadays a euphemism for “a bitter, jaded NFL fan”) I fiddled around with the Living Stories page focused on the Redskins. Here are the key components of Living Stories from what I can tell:
- Content is aggregated onto one page – Much like a blog, Living Stories aggregates related stories onto one page. Articles throughout the page can be expanded and shrunk on the page.
- Enhanced navigational elements – Living Stories seems to have some interesting navigational elements that are aimed at making it easier to interact with a news story. You can browse chronologically, by sub-topic (I think they are using some clustering algorithm to distill sub-topics), and by content type.
- Personalization – Living Stories will tell you whether or not there are updates since your last visit and will make some changes to the presentation of stories based on your usage.
So after spending some time playing around with Living Stories, here are some initial observations I have:
1. It’s innovative - Google, The Post and The Times are trying something new and experimental and I commend them for that. I think in some ways, newspapers have been moving in this direction for a while however this seems to be a bit of a leap forward.
2. I like the aesthetic – I like the fact that the aesthetic is pretty spartan, a clear departure from the aesthetic on display on many newspaper Web sites today. In typical Google fashion, the focus is on content and providing a clean UX.
3. I like the timeline UI - The timeline presents a pretty simple way of viewing a story chronologically that is interactive and allows you to to easily navigate to the story you are interested in. Furthermore, there is a persistent navigational elements that contains the prominent stories, chronologically organized, which I found to be a useful navigational tool.
4. I’m not crazy about the scrolling - I prefer a multipage/hyperlinked approach. I’m not crazy about extensive scrolling and the expanders on the Living Stories page cause you to scroll quite a bit to navigate through the content.
5. Provided the newspapers host the page, I think it will help drive search traffic - I am assuming that the reason this is hosted on the Google domain is because it is still in beta and the ultimate plan is to transition the domain onto the newspaper Web sites. If that assumption is true then I do believe that this will help newspaper sites rank better in organic search for high-volume topics. For example, the Post currently ranks 10 in Google organic for “Washington Redskins.” If this helps them get above the fold then it will help increase their overall traffic significantly.
6. It seems like this could harm ad revenue - Aggregating all stories onto one page seems like it would cut back on available ad inventory. Initially, newspapers would map one page to one story and as they became more sophisticated about optimizing inventory, they started mapping one story to multiple pages. This is almost the opposite approach, which seems like it would significantly reduce ad inventory.
7. I can see how this might help the bottom line – I’m guessing this is all arranged algorithmically so if it is equal or better from the reader’s standpoint that would mean newspapers wouldn’t have to pay editors to arrange all this content, which would reduce operational costs somewhat. That being said, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.
8. Living Stories could be more social - It seems like there was almost a deliberate effort to eliminate social features like sharing. It does seem like there is a ‘comments’ section but it is buried far below the stories. I find this curious. I also find it interesting there isn’t any user-driven arrangement of content on the site. My recommendation would be to think about how these stories can be socialized a bit more.
If I were to verbalize the problems that Living Stories (in it’s current form) solves, I would list them as follows:
- Newspapers don’t do a good job leveraging original content to tap into organic search traffic.
- Newspaper users are not satisfied with the information architecture of content on newspaper sites.
I think Living Stories will answer #1 for sure and possibly #2 for a segment of more sophisticated news consumers.
That being said I think there are other issues that Living Stories doesn’t solve, including:
- How do we address the blurring lines between media production and consumption.
That being said, I know this is still in Labs so I’m sure Cohen and his team are going to be iterating rapidly over the next year. I’m excited to see how this things evolves.
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