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Google Living Stories is an experimental project by Google that showcased (over a brief period between 2009 and 2010) how technology could be used effectively to provide a new, richer and more effective way to organize, serve and present news stories online.

In the Living Stories model, each story is a stream that is continuously updated over time with new updates, additional stories, images, and other multimedia resources that are published over time. 

These are organized on the page in a way that provides maximum accessibility to the reader, allowing him to skim, explore, filter or dig in depth into any category or specific item.

Nonetheless abandoned by Google, Living Stories remains a very inspiring example of how automated news aggregation and manual curation, both required in heavy doses to achieve this type of results, could provide a truly innovative mode of producing and offering access to news information.

The greatest news of all is that Google has left the model, examples and infrastructure for using and improving upon it available to everyone for free.

"The Living Stories code is available as open-source for anyone to use on their own sites at: http://code.google.com/p/living-stories/" 

Must see. 9/10

Free to study, use and adopt.

More info and examples: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/ 

WordPress plugin: https://code.google.com/p/living-stories/wiki/WordpressInstallation 

It's the second time that I go back to this insightful article by Jonathan Stray, dating back to 2011, but which was visionary and rightful then as it is still now. The first time I did, right after it came out, I didn't actually realize in full how relevant and important was the idea being communicated through it.

On the surface the article talks about an hypotethical Editorial Search Engine as a desirable news app. But if you look just beyond the surface, which is by itself fascinating, in essence, Mr. Stray indicates how useful and effective it would be if news publishers moved on from reporting and into 100% curated coverage of a certain topic, issue or story, opening a fascinating discovery gateway around each story and allowing in time for these streams to intersect and interconnect with each other.

By doing this, we can not only make the news much more interesting and relevant, but we can transform them into instruments for in-depth learning about anything we are interested in.

In this light the future of news could be very much about Comprehensively Informing an Audience on a Specific Topic. And if you stop enough time to re-read it and think about it, this is a pretty powerful and revolutionary concept by itself.

He specifically writes: "Rather than (always, only) writing stories, we should be trying to solve the problem of comprehensively informing the user on a particular topic."

"Choose a topic and start with traditional reporting, content creation, in-house explainers and multimedia stories. Then integrate a story-specific search engine that gathers together absolutely everything else that can be gathered on that topic, and applies whatever niche filtering, social curation, visualization, interaction and communication techniques are most appropriate."

Jonathan Stray makes also a very inspiring connection to Jay Rosen of NYU and his idea of covering 100% of a story which in my view correctly anticipated the niche content curation trend while going beyond it in its effort to explore gateways to innovation. 

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Insightful. Visionary. Inspiring. 9/10

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A useful article on the  role of journalists by Jonathan Stray. He postulates that rather than writing stories, journalists should be trying to solve the problem of comprehensively informing the user on a particular topic, by applying filtering, social curation, visualistion and interaction with their audience. I think the professional press has woken up to this, and commend the Guardian for their insightful reporting. 

Google Living Stories is an experimental project by Google that showcased (over a brief period between 2009 and 2010) how technology could be used effectively to provide a new, richer and more effective way to organize, serve and present news stories online.

In the Living Stories model, each story is a stream that is continuously updated over time with new updates, additional stories, images, and other multimedia resources that are published over time. 

These are organized on the page in a way that provides maximum accessibility to the reader, allowing him to skim, explore, filter or dig in depth into any category or specific item.

Nonetheless abandoned by Google, Living Stories remains a very inspiring example of how automated news aggregation and manual curation, both required in heavy doses to achieve this type of results, could provide a truly innovative mode of producing and offering access to news information.

The greatest news of all is that Google has left the model, examples and infrastructure for using and improving upon it available to everyone for free.

"The Living Stories code is available as open-source for anyone to use on their own sites at: http://code.google.com/p/living-stories/" 

Must see. 9/10

Free to study, use and adopt.

More info and examples: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/ 

WordPress plugin: https://code.google.com/p/living-stories/wiki/WordpressInstallation 

If you are wondering what the future of news may really look like, my advice is to give a very good read to this fantastic article.

In it, Nicco Mele and John Wihbey report the sad state of the news industry and illustrate the facts that indicate an alternative, high-value path that can be taken for the future. The tracks are already there, paved by some pioneering orgs and by a bunch of small individual personalities on the web. 

This article distills the very own business and development approach I have been using since 2008, when I have decided to move away from depending on Google-based advertising revenues and toward the creation of a service dedicated specifically to develop information-based micro-businesses focusing on individual personalities.

Here, from a ton of interesting content I have excerpted 10 key thoughts that stand out for me as being fully representative of the new model that is emerging for the future of the news business (curators, subject-mater experts, individual with a real expertise read closely).

1) ...terrifying signs of the decline of the news industry.

...three of America’s most esteemed papers for sale — The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times...

2) News revenue remains overwhelmingly dependent upon advertising, but the radical connectivity of the Internet has greatly diminished both the scale of newspapers’ reach as well as the value of advertising.

3) What if journalists became like your doctor, dentist, or teacher — people who provide a valuable service to you, and whose name, voice, and personality are more intimate? ...The question then becomes how to create a social presentation layer that wraps around news — preserving the integrity of the product but updating its interface to fit with human behavior in the digital age.

4) Without an identity, much journalistic content will increasingly be swept around the Internet in an anonymous blur of sharing and finding through networks, with little regard for the source or the labors taken to produce that news.

5) ...re-design the newspaper to be a platform for talent across multiple media. ......what if news outlets decided to flip their model, so that the editorial staff was not subservient to the brand, but the “brand” became a platform for talent?

6) ...outlets, like Boing Boing, are making money largely based on the brands of several smart, interesting personalities. Many of the “blogging networks” are built around aggregating traffic across different online personalities. One could name dozens of examples where a single blogger or news personality is driving substantial traffic. ...we’re already likely to see a “new dance between top talent and media brands,”... “If brands are successful at assembling enough talent,” ... “they’ll succeed because they provide easy entry points for us consumers.”

7) The future of news organizations is a lot of [diversfied] revenue sources — maybe as many as 30 or 40 — and none of them account for a substantial stake of the organization’s income.

8) In March of 2008, Kevin Kelly famously put forth the theory of 1,000 true fans as a potential future for music. Find 1,000 dedicated enthusiasts willing to pay you $100 a year for your music, and then you don’t have to worry about selling albums.

9) Why are more journalists not doing the same — and creating more kinds of editorial products to sell — while cultivating a paying fan base?

With the decline of trust and loyalty in large institutions, it is increasingly hard to imagine people in the coming decades subscribing because of loyalty to an institutional Big Media entity. Yet it’s easy to imagine them wanting to fund several people whom they trust to bring them information they care about.

10) ...research to date shows that the average news consumer is a creature of habit, circling back to the same two to four big websites to get their news. But this will not continue in perpetuity... “Elite” news consumers — ... already organize their consumption this way, around key Twitter and RSS feeds, following lists of personalities they like or admire. The broader public will ultimately begin to shift in this direction.

Milestone. Must-read article. Insightful. Inspiring. Well-documented. 10/10

Full article: http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/04/the-end-of-big-media-when-news-orgs-move-from-brands-to-platforms-for-talent/

Well, you can start thinking about it... what is coming out of this for you... personally and company-wise...

this space is fair fizzing, and the pace of change and creative destruction is - if anything - continuing to accelerate ...