Five Years Since the Big Bang
This December will mark five years since The New York Times’ digital team published an interactive story that changed both the way users consume content online and how journalists produce it.
“Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” became an overnight sensation. So revolutionary was the Times’ project, that it led to the development of a whole new journalistic field. “Snowfall,” has become synonymous with an interactive storytelling page. Why so much fuss about a page with a few videos, some gifs and interactive graphics?

Around 2012 the digital news industry was experiencing something of a rebirth. Responsive web design was still new and many news organisations were waiting for their competitors to roll out their new sites, tailored for all devices. The New York Times never did — they decided to go with the adaptive web design that they still use today.
Newly born “front-end developers” were starting their fight with the classic back-end developers, hoping to convince them that JavaScript should not be considered the malicious technology for which it had been known for so long.
Amazon was winning with its revolutionary Kindle, and Apple was breaking norms with its iPad. News organizations were facing the bitter truth: Paper is dying and we are not ready.
New devices and new methods of consuming content were being born, but there was no content for them yet. Everything was too new, too fragile. Where there was technology, the ideas were missing. Where there were ideas, know-how was in short supply.

This is why Snowfall created such an impact. It worked across devices and at the same time was full of interactive content amenable to changing user inputs — scrolling on a desktop and swiping on tablets and mobile phones. The content was presented in chapters so the user didn’t need to scroll endlessly until the end. Smooth and well made video loops created an absorbent atmosphere that kept users on the page — and kept them reading. And it was beautiful. The Times had proven that long-form journalism had a place online.
It also had shown that the times when journalists could produce feature content alone are gone. It shepherded in a new era in which it would be necessary to collaborate with graphic designers and developers while creating content, unlike in the world where newspapers dominated. The same would apply to graphic designers and developers. They would need to contribute to the content itself with their ideas — meaning it would also be necessary for them to have at least some journalistic background or training to be as helpful as possible.

Five years later we can still see that many journalists have trouble adapting to the new rules of the game. It’s not just the text they write. It is also the design, the user experience, and the deep social analysis of the audience. And they need to accept it. But it’s easy to say and hard to do. Professionals who have been writing for print their entire lives cannot simply switch to the new platform and skip the learning process. It is not enough to know just about journalism anymore.
Journalists need to learn modern technologies and follow trends. They don’t necessary need to learn coding and design itself but they need to know about elementary rules for publishing online and they also need to accept the fact that whatever they learn will likely change again in the near feature.
Because the web is a living organism and there are no eternal dogmas. Not yet.
