Bringing together the reporting of two major newspapers and the technical savvy of Google, “Living Stories” presents articles, timelines and other tools to track eight ongoing events.
The topics include Health Policy – though each publication’s coverage is segregated – and swine flu, as well as general news topics such as the new head of Washington, D.C., schools, global warming and executive compensation.
The site describes the project as an experiment in presenting news specifically for the online environment. Among the claims:
All in one place
Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritized on one URL. You can now quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load.Easy to explore
Each story has an evolving summary of current developments as a well as an interactive timeline of critical events. Stories can be explored by themes, significant participants or multimedia.Smarter reading
Updates to the story are highlighted each time you come back, and older news is summarized.
It’s an interesting concept but, to be truly useful, such a tool needs to include much more diverse sources of information. We’re looking forward to see how this experiment progresses.
(Hat tip to NASW’s Tabitha M. Powledge)
