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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

#91

Post by jashkenas »

fourstar wrote: post #89
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.

I'm not surprised since Jeremy Ashkenas works there. They've got probably some of the best front-end web developers and they're extremely smart for realizing that those kind of people are what it takes to keep them relevant today.

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...

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#92

Post by MartinCron »

bencpeters wrote: post #67
grecy wrote: post #43

I'm an avoid back country snowboarder (split boarder) in the Canadian Rockies, and now further north into Coastal Alaska and I've spent many seasons as ski patrol, and taken numerous Avalanche training courses. After my first 4 day course, the message was very clear: "You are now the least knowledgeable people that should be in the back country". I kept thinking "I know just enough to know I know nothing". Reading th…

The overwhelming reaction I had to this was of how bad the group dynamic sounded. I don't really agree with "severe lack of training and practice caused deaths". Everyone involved had some degree of backcountry experience - many of them had a lot. The issue wasn't lack of training and practice, the issue was how many of the skiers ignored their training and didn't listen to what their experience was trying to tell th…

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.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#93

Post by jrwoodruff »

jashkenas wrote: post #91
fourstar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised since Jeremy Ashkenas works there. They've got probably some of the best front-end web developers and they're extremely smart for realizing that those kind of people are what it takes to keep them relevant today.

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 again...

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#94

Post by MartinCron »

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.

I literally gasped when it got to the animated map display. Truly brilliant.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#96

Post by mattdennewitz »

arrrg wrote: post #73
sharkweek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pitchfork (the music review site) employs this technique for their "Cover Story" features, some are better than others. I personally enjoy the "alive" feel of the stories: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/

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.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#97

Post by jashkenas »

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…

You should get back into it then. I know the Times is always looking for good folks.

I'm in Interactive News, on the news side (for a few more days, at least ;) Special features like this one are usually done by Multimedia (recently merged with the Graphics team), and there are also many detailed individual graphics, photos, and videos that are a part of it.

Things like article templates are more in the Design department -- but they also collaborated on this. Really, everyone pitches in as best they can.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#98

Post by omegaworks »

tsunamifury wrote: post #54
arscan wrote: post #10

I think this works because the little videos in the breaks actually do a great job of complementing the content of the article (and happen to be pretty). There was a link yesterday on HN that used a similar technique, but the breaks were static images that didn't really add anything to the content of the article [1]. Sure, they're pretty and novel, but I thought the breaks did more harm then good for somebody actuall…

I dont think this works at all. Its heavy, difficult to read, and full of distractions. The fade in animations are unnecessary and the parallax scrolling adds nothing to the story. The multimedia functions more as footnotes or interruptions that route you outside of the narrative. Its mobile-unfriendly and breaks the UI of NYT.com.

I liked it in principle - hated it in practice. The scroll-triggered animations were annoying. My internet happened to burp in the middle of reading the article and I was left with a lot of blankness and loading, until I reconnected AND refreshed the page.

The animations started playing right as soon as I scrolled on to them, meaning they were partially obscured until I scrolled to a certain point. If I accidentally passed that super special point, they were abruptly obscured on the opposite side by the rest of the article.

Re: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

#99

Post by yock »

If you read enough survival memoirs you start to see elements of these stories common between them. One of those elements is concern over how one will be seen by their peers for expressing caution.

I don't like to speak authoritatively about most subjects, but I feel very strongly about this one thing. Vanity has no place in the back country. Gosh, in a group of 16 people, not all of whom are acquainted, if at least one doesn't think you're a sissy then it's plainly impossible that everyone is well informed of the risks being taken.

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