“The Living Stories project is an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment (…) Complete coverage of an on-going story is gathered together and prioritised on one URL.”

What’s more Google’s new project allows readers to explore stories by theme, the characters involved or by multimedia coverage. Each time you return to the story URL new developments are highlighted and older news is summarised.

The prototype apparently came from discussions with executives at three newspaper groups and marks another step by Google to work with the publishing industry (see last week’s announcements regarding First Click and indexing) while cleverly re-emphasising its position:

“We believe it’s just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways – ways that simply aren’t possible offline,” an introductory post on the Official Google Blog explains.

“While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we’re not journalists and we don’t create content.”