As social media and the web have made the transmission and sharing of news and information faster and more efficient, there have been casualties. We’ve reported frequently on the beleaguered state of the newspaper industry and the efforts underway to help them survive.

Google has been at the center of both the decline of newspaper and the effort to save them. It tried (and failed) at print ads and has added new options for publishers that make it easier for them to control their content within Google and Google News.

Today, a new Google project popped up in Google Labs that is a unique extension of this effort. It’s called Living Stories, and its goal is to provide a new and efficient way to read news coverage on breaking stories from one location. Oh, and it’s enlisted the New York Times and the Washington Post for help.

How Living News Works

Google describes Living Stories as “an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment.” The goal is to create specific pages where you can view all of the coverage on a specific story.

Currently, the homepage is essentially topic bundles from either the New York Times or the Washington Post. Current topics include executive and CEO compensation, Swine Flu, the NFL’s Washington Redskins, and the War in Afghanistan. You can select to see all news stories from this page.

That’s when you really realize the beauty of the Living Stories project. The page you are taken towards is a rich multimedia experience, complete with a timeline outlining key events, a sidebar that breaks down coverage (for Afghanistan, it’s divided between Opinion, Casualties, U.S. Policy, and other topics), and an RSS feed-like display of recent articles. It’s clean and simple, but effectively explains key issues.

It’s tough to tell how much of Living Stories is editorial and how much of it is algorithmic – it seems that Google does pick some articles and pulls images and videos for each page, but that the newspapers have control over what is displayed as content.

Living Stories isn’t a groundbreaking new technology, but it is a pleasing way to read the news. What we think is even more important is that the New York Times and the Washington Post partnered with Google to try out a new method at news distribution, rather than declare Google the enemy.

Newspapers will not survive by holding onto inefficient practices. The NYT and the Washington post are proving that they realize this and are finding ways to adapt to the web. This experiment may just be the beginning of even greater forays into saving journalism and bringing it effectively to the web.

Tags: Google, google labs, Google Living Stories, Living Stories, new york times, newspapers, washington post

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