I have to admit that my first instinct in critiquing this piece is that the New York Times did an amazing job putting lipstick on a pig. As the article states multiple times: avalanche deaths have become pretty common. I grew up driving through Stevens Pass every winter for the first 15 years of my life. This story could have easily just been a few paragraphs in the Seattle Times along with the requisite obituaries. But apparently someone at the New York Times had a vision and was willing to back them up (with a team of over a dozen folks dedicated mainly to the graphics and design of the piece).

I think it’s safe to say that it worked out tremendously well. The seemingly effortless interspersing of multimedia (audio recordings, first-hand GoPro videos, and interviews) makes for a natural and fluid read. The content is integrated in such a way that you never have to exit the article even though it’s all done in a commonplace web browser (rather than a dedicated app which would have given the designers an easier time controlling everything that could go wrong on the reader’s end).

It’s not hard to envision a lot of stories being well-suited to this format. The only problem, as far as I can tell, is that writing something like this is an obscene amount of work. The recent NYT magazine piece which took up the entire magazine Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart is a good example of how this format is continuing to evolve. I’d love to see a two-part story in this format, on Hillary Clinton’s life and Donald Trump’s life. I think too few people understand what advantages and disadvantages the two were born into, and this format could allow a more complete picture to be formed.