The “Snow Fall” question
Experimenting with new forms of presentation is not “a virus.”
The New York Times kicked off a new generation of visual stories when they launched “Snow Fall” last year — so many stories got the treatment afterwards that’s it has become a verb for some people. After the euphoria of the initial release started to wear off many have pointed to usability hurdles and high costs of these over-the-top feature designs.
All of the concerns aside I’m convinced it’s important to continue to experiment with new ways of telling stories — and I’m surprised that people who are leading voices of innovation in journalism are saying otherwise.
There are plenty of solid complaints about these sorts of designs:
- Vertigo-inducing parallax scrolling
- Mobile/tablet support often half-baked at best
- Navigation is often a challenge
- Automatically playing video and audio are annoying
- Hard to save to services like Pocket or Instapaper
- Printability is rare
On a larger level these presentations can overpower the story they’re trying to tell — either by being more interesting or making the whole thing so confusing that users give up. I’m sure that on some of these stories designers went all out to push the envelope … or editors wanted to really blow out a story and the final product ended up overdone.
I’ve been working in this space for a long time and I can tell you that these things are not cheap — sometimes it’s clearly not worth doing just for the sake of an ego trip. And it’s perfectly reasonable to wonder if this money could be better spent on enterprise journalism.
What’s missing from all of this for me is a sense of perspective: “Snow fall” is a direct descendant of lush magazine/newspaper layouts. This is not a new idea by any means; it’s just taking advantage of new features available in this platform.
It’s also worth noting that we’re still discussing this piece from 2012. Now that it’s a year old it’s easy to look back and point to real usability issues and wonder whether it was worth it. But at the time the Times moved the bar forward tremendously: it was a new form and it provided a reference point. Newsroom teams everywhere suddenly had something to show their bosses to and say “this is amazing, maybe we can do more with our stories.”
Like any sort of breakthrough in design or technology the quality of what has followed varies wildly. A great deal of money has been spent and a lot of it has likely been wasted — chasing attention, the admiration of peers in the industry, the time spent metric, et al. This is not so different from many other recent periods in journalism (or other industries for that matter): loads of money gets bet on the future and the ideas don’t always pan out.
In the wake of “Snow Fall” other stories — often more usable ones that tell the story without being overpowering — have emerged from places like The Washington Post, NPR and Polygon (although the latter presentation was more interesting than the game console it profiled.) Maybe these things would have happened without “Snow Fall” but I doubt it. The teams working on these things learn from what came before and things get better as new ideas get mixed in.
The endgame here is to try and come up with new ways to consume stories when it’s appropriate — a halfway between text, video, et al — and find a sustainable way to make it work. I don’t think we’re there yet. Furthermore I think taking the more egregious examples and condemning the lot of it is shortsighted — outside of the media-world there’s real evidence that readers appreciate aspects of these stories and there’s clearly an appetite for more. Video is an answer but probably not the only answer: it’s costly, hard to update and doesn’t always take advantage of the platform in ways that add to the story.
So my question is if this early-stage work trying new forms isn’t an appropriate area of journalistic innovation what is?
Although I’ve been working for a public television documentary series for a very long time I’m speaking only for myself here.
