Required Reading for Journalists (and Anyone Else Who Thinks the New York Times‘s Interactive Web Stuff Rocks)

New York magazine looks into the guys who remade the New York Times‘s web presence. They look like this:

They’re doing this:

Even as the financial pages [have been writing] the paper’s obit, deep within that fancy Renzo Piano palace across from the Port Authority, something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times’ website—video, audio, “drillable” graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, there’s a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio “back story” with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.

Remember the Word Train on the day of the election, that stream of words that described how people were feeling in the moment, the bigger the word the more people feeling it? They did that. Writes New York‘s Emily Nussbaum:

Elements like the Word Train appear at first glance quite un-Timesian, but at second, they provide a philosophical jolt—what is the Word Train, after all, but a variation on the classic “streeter,” that roundup of quotes from twenty voters, this time done with many anonymous thousands?

The whole thing’s here.