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Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

nytimes.com

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Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#121

Post by sageikosa »

pinaceae wrote: post #101
MartinCron wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The group dynamic reminds me of a chat I had with a friendly guy at my local motorcycle shop. He calls it "rally fever" when a bunch of guys on motorcycles (or scooters, or whatever) get together for a ride and let their inhibitions slip just enough to take that turn just a little bit too fast. I am sure group rides are lots of fun, but I would be mindful of being extra cautious.

motorcycle group rides are the worst - overtaking a slower moving vehicle becomes way more risky. the first guy assesses, knows he will fit. second guy has enough power and reaction time to follow. the third+x goes in blind and behind and sometimes goes splat. sometimes because of a vehicle, sometimes because the vehicle in front blocked the view of a tightening turn. riding in a group for a long time also gives you…

I ride a commuter train in the greater Philadelphia region, at least once we mostly overshot the station (7 car train) with only two or three cars still at the station. The side-doors at the vestibule end were open; since the station had no platform, the auto-doors were locked in the open state and the stairwells were in the open position. Looking down I could see the rail-bed, then a relatively annoying drop into weeds. If I had decided to descend the steps, exit the train there and walk beside the train back to the station I was certain that I would be OK, but that other people would follow me down that path and get hurt. I didn't want that to happen, so I walked back through the train, and everyone followed.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#122

Post by moronic_shit »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #71

The NYT just kinda blew my mind. A newspaper article just blew my mind. This is, by far, the best multimedia storytelling I think I've ever seen. Kudos to the team involved in putting this together, you've shown me the future of media and the internet.

the NYTimes is a failing operation desperately grabbing at any approach that may bring in readers. this story, with its complexity of mixed media, disrupted the story and made it hard to follow. fortunately, i use tools that strip the text and allow me to read it as one continuous whole. let the story tell the story. quit trying to be hip or 'trending'.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#123

Post by jashkenas »

freyfogle wrote: post #115
jrwoodruff wrote: post #71

The NYT just kinda blew my mind. A newspaper article just blew my mind. This is, by far, the best multimedia storytelling I think I've ever seen. Kudos to the team involved in putting this together, you've shown me the future of media and the internet.

Is anyone from the NYT here and can you give any insight into how long this project took to complete? Is this a beautiful one off, or is the goal that this format eventually becomes the new norm?

This interview with Steve and Andrew should give you more details into the process, and links to similar projects done in the past: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/new-york-t...

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#124

Post by viraptor »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #120

Pretty snow pictures not impressing me. Annoyed at the interruption of the storey flow. Never watch irrelevant videos anyway - hate podcasts with a passion - information density around zero. So not for everybody. From the comments here, you'd think its gods gift to journalism. Also it hijacked my Back button on my browser, had to kill the page, lost my browse context so I resent it for that too.

> Also it hijacked my Back button on my browser, had to kill the page, lost my browse context so I resent it for that too.

Right-/long-click your back button (depending on your browser) to get the local history. Then choose one page before NYT.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#125

Post by JoeAltmaier »

viraptor wrote: post #124
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #120

Pretty snow pictures not impressing me. Annoyed at the interruption of the storey flow. Never watch irrelevant videos anyway - hate podcasts with a passion - information density around zero. So not for everybody. From the comments here, you'd think its gods gift to journalism. Also it hijacked my Back button on my browser, had to kill the page, lost my browse context so I resent it for that too.

> Also it hijacked my Back button on my browser, had to kill the page, lost my browse context so I resent it for that too. Right-/long-click your back button (depending on your browser) to get the local history. Then choose one page before NYT.

Cool!

But I wonder why reasonable people would ever write a page to hijack 'Back'. Annoys me every time.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#127

Post by willyt »

sageikosa wrote: post #121
pinaceae wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

motorcycle group rides are the worst - overtaking a slower moving vehicle becomes way more risky. the first guy assesses, knows he will fit. second guy has enough power and reaction time to follow. the third+x goes in blind and behind and sometimes goes splat. sometimes because of a vehicle, sometimes because the vehicle in front blocked the view of a tightening turn. riding in a group for a long time also gives you…

I ride a commuter train in the greater Philadelphia region, at least once we mostly overshot the station (7 car train) with only two or three cars still at the station. The side-doors at the vestibule end were open; since the station had no platform, the auto-doors were locked in the open state and the stairwells were in the open position. Looking down I could see the rail-bed, then a relatively annoying drop into we…

I was on my way to school, the train got stuck about 100m out of the station because there were ground up leaves causing adhesion problems. The train sat there for about an hour, no announcements or anything, it was packed, people were jammed right up against each other and it was getting hot. Someone lost it, forced the doors open and jumped out, then lots of people just followed them. It was a pretty dangerous thing to do because the third rail was right below the doors and you had to sit on the step and then drop down about 1.5m onto the ballast right beside it. After the first couple of people jumped out I think the train crew probably got the traction current switched off and got some steps out but by then most people had jumped out and started walking on to the next station. So you probably did the right thing there!

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#128

Post by untog »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #93
jashkenas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit where credit's due -- this project has nothing to do with me. A small army of talented folks from Sports, the Graphics department, Photo and Video put it together over the course of several months: http://cl.ly/LibF More details on how it was made here: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/198970/how-th...

As a former newsroom graphic artist, I'm really curious - I assume you work on the web team rather than the news side? What is the separation between the news teams and the web development team? Does the graphics team build special features like this? Are they also responsible for designing or building article templates? It's fun watching the new order take shape, and pieces like this make me long for the newsroom ag…

There isn't one, all-encompassing web team. The Interactive News department (as Jeremy has described) is in the newsroom, while teams like the one I am a member of (which make more structural stuff, for want of a better word) are a few floors away from the newsroom.

It's kind of a reflection of how deeply the web is (and will continue to be) integrated into organisations like NYT.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#129

Post by axusgrad »

c1sc0 wrote: post #117
freyfogle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone from the NYT here and can you give any insight into how long this project took to complete? Is this a beautiful one off, or is the goal that this format eventually becomes the new norm?

It says right at the bottom, copied for your convenience: Graphics and design by Hannah Fairfield, Xaquín G.V., Jon Huang, Wayne Kamidoi, Sam Manchester, Alan McLean, Jacky Myint, Graham Roberts, Joe Ward, Jeremy White and Josh Williams. Photography by Ruth Fremson. Video by Catherine Spangler. Additional video by Eric Miller and Shane Wilder. Kristen Millares Young contributed research. The reporting for this articl…

How much all this quality reporting and presentation cost? I have a feeling that in-depth journalism doesn't pay for itself.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#130

Post by arrrg »

mattdennewitz wrote: post #96
arrrg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful, but one fatal flaw is that they make the font size dependent on window width. I usually have to browser windows open and next to each other, each using about 720 horizontal pixels. With Pitchfork’s layout that results in way too tiny fonts. I think it’s fundamentally wrong to make font size dependent on viewport width. What you want is to make it dependent on ppi and typical viewing distances (a phone can…

> I usually have to browser windows open and next to each other, each using about 720 horizontal pixels. call me crazy, but the way your arrange your windows is not really a use case we design for at pitchfork. i agree that there may be a better way to do this, though, but we made the choice to scale fonts to viewport because we want a certain amount of information to look a certain way per page.

Ah, that's just my own pet peeve. Web design is full of trade offs and I think you made the right one. It's really not a good idea to view those articles with a 720px wide viewport. As I said, beautiful work and keep it up!
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