In a peace offering to newspapers, Google offers a new news format

Is there any money in it?

Is there a plan for the Times and the Post to be compensated for their appearance in Google Living Stories? "As for direct compensation, this was a collaborative effort: Google provided the technology platform for Living Stories, the Times and Post's journalists wrote and edited the stories, and we collaborated to make the user interface fit with these news organizations' editorial vision," responded Google's Chris Gaither. "We decided with our partners that Google Labs was the best place to host this experiment for now as we test the ideas behind it, but our goal is for publishers to host Living Stories on their own Web sites."

That's a very interesting assertion, especially given Kurtz' revelation that "the story pages will reside at Google Labs for an experimental period...and revert to the papers' own Web sites if all goes well." Apparently, Google Labs is working on software that would eventually enable online news publishers to present articles using the Living Stories format, through their own servers.
Whether these stories will be meshed together in a collective timeline, the way the first Living Stories test does now, may be undetermined at this point. That would imply that stories are also available through a single portal -- a collective portal that publishers may perhaps "opt into" as an alternative or supplement to Google News, the company's current released version of its aggregation service.

In the meantime, Google is actually offering the concept of the format as a kind of free contribution to the publishing community, assuming anyone out there had the software to accomplish it.

"Google Living Stories represents one possible implementation of these characteristics," reads the company's Principles of Living Stories, published yesterday. "Any news organization, however, can apply these elements for a living story section on their site."

Or as Gaither put it to us, "If publishers decide to implement Living Stories on their own Web sites, they certainly can.

"Our goal is to innovate on existing presentations of journalism that take greater advantage of technological capabilities on the Web," he added. "We hope that news publishers find the ideas embodied in the Living Story compelling, and consider adopting it on their own Web sites. For this reason, we plan to work on open source tools for creating Living Stories that any news organization can use. For the duration of this initial experiment, however, Living Story Pages will contain news content provided only by the Times and the Post."

Although the "editorial vision" of Living Stories, for now, may represent the insight of just two publishers (which have collaborated together before -- in the case of the International Herald Tribune, for 37 years), the financial vision for the system has yet to be supplied by anyone at all. Gaither told us that advertising -- Google's core business -- will not play a role in Living Stories during the experiment.

But it's unimaginable that Google would attempt this experiment on such a high level with zero business interest whatsoever. Last September, the company revealed in its response to a questionnaire from the Newspaper Association of America, that it was working on a hosting system for news content that would enable publishers to invoke a micropayment model, paying as little as fractions of a cent for reading articles from participating publishers...assuming publishers participate.

And that may be what Living Stories is truly about: getting at least two publishers to participate in something Google is doing.

"The news industry is undergoing a difficult transition, driven in no small part by print subscription declines and increased competition for classified and display advertising dollars," noted Chris Gaither to Betanews today. "Journalism is an important source of the high quality information for which Google users search, and it's crucial for an informed citizenry. We're happy to see so many news publishers trying experiments, and we want to partner with them to help them build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences, and generate more revenue."

That may also be what some publishers want -- at least, that's what one publisher said today in Google's public forum for comments on Living Stories.

"It would be far more helpful to most news organizations if Google worked with publishers on developing new business models," wrote Industry Standard Managing Editor Ian Lamont. "Looking at the prototype, I don't see any indication that display advertising or other revenue-generation services are part of the plan, or how these pages would be adapted to online news sites' existing templates that have revenue-generating services built-in."