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Google, The Washington Post and The New York Times unveiled an experiment in online presentation of news on Tuesday called "Living Stories," described as a more dynamic way of reading news on the Web.
"The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online," Neha Singh, a Google software engineer, and Josh Cohen, Google senior business product manager, said in a blog post.
"We're excited to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them," they said.
Living Stories groups coverage of a particular topic from a news organization under a single URL, or Web address.
The New York Times' coverage of the war in Afghanistan, for example, is presented on a single Web page with links to news articles, opinion columns, photos, video, graphics and other material.
The page includes a summary of important developments with links to Times stories, a timeline of significant events, profiles of important players and links to archived stories such as coverage of the recent Afghan elections.
Users can choose how they want to view the articles on the page -- by "most important," "newest first" or "oldest first" -- and scroll up or down through a list of stories.
Conveniently, clicking on a link on a "Living Stories" page does not navigate a user away from the page.
The unveiling of "Living Stories" comes amid attacks on Google by some US newspaper publishers, particularly News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has accused the company of profiting from his content without sharing advertising revenue.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt responded to the charges in an opinion piece in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal last week saying "frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame."
Rejecting charges Google was responsible for their woes, Schmidt said Google wants to "work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers and make more money."
The "Living Stories" pages are currently hosted by Google but will eventually reside on the websites of the Times and the Post.
