It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories. I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting.

—Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company

So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it’s told in newspapers.  They haven’t taken advantage of what the Web offers to tell news in a different way…This project is a pilot. The idea is to make improvements based on the feedback we receive, then make those tools more widely available…On the search side, there’s a single page to point to. Instead of thousands of links, there is a single point of reference. And that’s helpful for users as well…I think we would expect that different publishers would take it in a number of different directions

—Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News

There’s been a series of steps to work with and mollify news publishers, to improve the P.R., and you can see the living page in that same vein

—Ken Doctor, a media analyst with the analysis firm Outsell

The culture of Google is a culture of engineers. We exist in different worlds…The idea is that users, news consumers, are interested in experiencing news in different ways, and it’s important for news organizations to be experimenting. . . . The question is, when you take the car out for a spin, what are the advantages?

—R.B. Brenner, deputy editor of The Post’s new Universal News Desk