Google Makes News (Better). Again

While everybody's patting themselves on the back today over the Pulitzers' look at journalism's past, news industry "scourge" Google is once again inventing journalism's future. Take a gander at the newest toy out of Google Labs, the Google News Timeline:

What this nifty little gadget does is pull together the top stories of the past few days (or weeks or months—it's configurable, natch) and displays them in, yes, a timeline. It's a nice at-a-glance way to catch up on what's been going on in the world (because most readers aren't up-to-the-minute news junkies like journos are). Very cool—and a clever example of news packaging.

Most importantly, it's quite simple, and something similar probably could have been developed by any smart news organization. That it came from Google, instead, says volumes about the smarts of news organizations these days.

PS: More in the same vein from Mathew Ingram at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Comments

[Joe Murphy]

Are there *any* news orgs out there trying new approaches to interface / presentation? I mean, beside the NYT. ('nother question: Do any of the NYT's sister papers get any of the online functionality goodies that the NYT builds?)

[Ted]

As a concept, the Google News Timeline is pretty cool. In practice, though, it's not all that useful or informative. Try searching just about any topic and see if the results you get in the timeline correlate at all for what you're interested in. Even something as seemingly binary as the "Phillies" leads to all kinds of unrelated content.

Obviously, it's still a Google Labs product, and they're sure to work out the bugs, but I'd say this is still more a proof of concept than a fully realized product.

[Dave Lee]

@Ted

But the Google News Timeline operates with the same operators that the search engine does. So you can search out all the unrelated stuff, no?

I like the timeline a lot. My only complaint is that it's a bit cluttered and ugly looking. I know (and love) Google's consistency of style -- but I think it could be improved for something like this to make it easier on the eye.