A Game of Shark and Minnow was designed with the aim to keep the reader active throughout the experience. In explaining the repercussions of the NSA files, they provide a consummate combination of text, photographs, video interviews with experts and interactive tools that allow you to explore your own data.īack to the New York Times Magazine now for this fascinating piece about a political drama building in a remote area of the South China Sea. Their follow-up, this September 2013 piece on the revelations made by Edward Snowden, just edges it for us. Their Firestorm piece earlier this year, an in-depth look at an Australian family trapped by a bushfire, was brilliantly executed and one of the paper’s most ambitious forays into long-form journalism to date.

The Guardian are certainly no strangers to producing multimedia experiences of their own.

As always, if you think there’s something missing from our list, we’d love to hear about it: drop us a line via Twitter The NSA Files: Decoded In the meantime, here are five examples that have impressed us. Perhaps it will be the steady march of new storytelling tools such as Creatavist and scroll kit – that remove the need for hours upon hours of coding – that will be key in moving the format forward. But producing features like this is neither cheap nor easy and where Snowfall succeeds in elevating the narrative, others have failed. It didn’t take long for people to begin hailing Snow Fall as the ‘ future of journalism’. Snow Fall went on to win the Times that year’s Pulitzer Prize and Executive Editor Jill Abramson has said that the influence has now spread so far that to snow fall has even become a verb in the Times’ editorial office. The result was impressive in the six days following its release, the Times website saw an influx of 3.5 million page views.

Written by the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, John Branch, it’s an epic retelling of a tragic, ill-fated ski trip that combines photographs, video interviews, moving graphics topped off with an in-trend parallax design. While by no means the first of its kind (take a look at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Black Hawk Down piece from way back in 1997), it made waves when it went viral back in December 2012 and has quickly become the poster boy for this new brand of digital long-form journalism. The most high-profile of these pieces has surely been the New York Times’ Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Peak. This approach aims to give the reader a totally immersive, sometimes even interactive experience. Where before a sprawling 7000 or 8000 word-long article would suffice, these new articles pull together photography, interviews, video content, infographics, maps and more presenting them all as a single unified narrative – often boasting some innovative use of HTML5. The result of this storytelling exploration so far has produced a slew of long-form, interactive multimedia pieces. The future of journalism almost certainly lies online but what techniques and approaches will be needed to engage the 21 st century reader? In the face of declining print sales and the old business model in jeopardy, journalists and editorial teams are having to look beyond the traditional ink and paper approach to storytelling more than ever before.

It’s no understatement to say the journalism industry finds itself in very uncertain times.

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