News Blog
The official blog from the team at Google News
Open-sourcing the Living Stories format
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
have been experimenting with
Living Stories
, a new format for covering news on the web. Using this technology platform, we can capture hundreds of developments as events unfold on a single dynamic page so that readers have many ways to easily digest the information. Living Stories has helped the
Times
enlighten readers on such subjects as
global warming
, the
Afghanistan war
, the
N.F.L. playoffs
and
executive compensation
. The
Post
has used it to report on
health care reform
, the
Redskins' season
and the
overhaul of the D.C. school system
.
Since we
launched
this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.
In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it. Today we're
open-sourcing the code
so all developers can build their own Living Story pages. (Here's the
open-source documentation
for technical details; read our
Google News Help Forum
to ask and answer general support questions.) Now that we're shifting into this public phase of the experiment, the
Times
and the
Post
are going to wind down their work on the version hosted on Google Labs. We'd like to thank them for embarking on this stage of the project with us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them, and many other publishers, on Living Stories as well as other projects that help to advance how news is presented online.
In coming months, we're going to look into creating software tools that make Living Stories even easier to use for news organizations. Until then, we can't wait to see what fascinating works of journalism developers, reporters and editors, working together, create using the open-sourced Living Stories code.
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