Exactly what online news should be or become is a subject that consumed the "blue sky" discussions among publishers since the late 1990s.

Despite every concept they've ever created, tried or untried, what publishers typically end up with is either something that looks segmented and departmentalized like CNN.com or NYTimes.com, or is basically a blog whose scroll reveals a history of news, like it was printed on a roll of paper towels.

So the concept that Google Labs began attempting yesterday with its "Living Stories" concept  is absolutely not new. It's been discussed before, in some fashion or another, and even approved -- for what it's worth. But on a large scale, it's never been done until yesterday: assembling all the stories relating to a pertinent, current topic on a page devoted to the topic, not the publisher and not some permanent department of the publication like "Sports" or "Tech."

Conceptually, the Living Stories concept makes a lot of sense, making the topic the center of the news. It requires the publisher to think differently about not only how news is presented, but how it's gathered.

Original article...

Further reading ... Google "Living Stories" to centralize news (Source: Money Times)
Google teams with papers on net news 'experiment' (Source: The Register)
Can Google's Living Stories Give Newspapers New Life? (Source: TechNewsWorld)