In what can be called an integrated story-telling strategy, Google has teamed up its Lab feature with two newspaper biggies - The Washington Post and The New York Times - to deliver its "Living Stories" prototype.

The "Living Stories" comprise topical collections of stories that have been created by each newspaper from its own content. At present, the story pages, which apparently are a time-efficient way to stay informed about specific issues of interest, include eight topics.

Aiming at the customizing of a topic, providing a summary and drawing attention to new information, Google's "Living Stories" will not only bring up newcomers up to speed quickly, but also provide easy updates for readers already familiar with a particular story.

By the way of the "Living Stories" experiment, Google will enable newspapers to offer their content as topic-specific pages; thereby extending to them a helping hand in building their topic centers. In the coming months, the Internet search giant intends making the user interface available to all interested newspaper businesses.

Introducing the new "Living Stories" feature on Tuesday, Google said in its official blog that if the project turns out to be a success, it plans to open source the requisite program code; thus enabling the newspapers to host "Living Stories" on their own sites, as well as package them with their own advertisements.