On this holiday week, I’m out of town but still couldn’t escape the blizzard conditions blanketing the Midwest and much of the rest of the country. So I’m settling in with a story and amazing piece of multimedia from the New York Times that I bookmarked last week. It’s an absolutely beautiful and breathtaking tale of an avalanche in Washington state, both the events leading up to and the people involved in the event in the moments before, during and following the event. The reporting, the writing, the photography, the videography, the audio, the use of animations and maps, and the overall story design… everything comes together into one of the single best pieces of multimedia content I’ve ever seen. This story is what multimedia packages ought to aspire to be.

So if you’re like me, home from the office and snowed in for the day, take a half hour (or more) to browse through the beautiful and thrilling story, “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” It’s a great read and a great example of how old-school reporting and storytelling play perfectly with new media tools to take a story from good to great and tell it in a way online the Internet could allow.

Right now we’re focused on responsive design. Perhaps after that comes responsive content.

If you’re a reader of Nieman Reports, you’ll remember the cover story from early this fall, “Breaking News: Mastering the Art of Disruptive Innovation in Journalism.” Nieman Fellow David Skok along with James Allworth co-wrote the piece with Clay Christensen, one of Harvard’s brilliant and popular business faculty.

One of Christensen’s main areas of academic focus is the concept of disruptive innovation and competition in business; this widely-shared article applied Christensen’s analysis – which has helped revitalize numerous businesses before his years academia – to the news industry, where an understood problem is figuring out how to survive and how to thrive.

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Journalists should go to more conferences that aren’t tailored to journalists. While we’re focusing on getting developer resources in the newsroom and trying to get the support infrastructure to do data and design experiments, there are web designers out there in the world who don’t have to ask these questions and are instead focusing on the right tools to actually get things done. At least that was the takeaway for me this weekend at my first non-journalism-specific conference in ages: the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit. Hundreds of developers and designers joined for the weekend to talk about the open source platform Drupal and tools to maximize Drupal’s usage. Here’s a list of the top tools I discovered around CSS3, responsive design and rapid prototyping.  Read more

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has released a report in collaboration with The Economist Group that looks at news consumption on mobile devices. The comprehensive study looks at the activities of 9,513 adults on tablets and smart phones, and their feelings about advertisements and paying for news.  Though PEJ has already created its own infographic, they’re asking the public to come up with something better. Read more

Gannett’s flagship newspaper, USA Today, announced today it’s relaunching its brand identity, and with it a redesigned paper (starting Friday) and website (starting this weekend). The redesign comes on the heels of the paper’s 30th anniversary — the colorful, graphic-heavy paper launched Sept. 15, 1982.

Here’s a quick video intro to the redesign (complete with a cheesy voiceover):

From USA Today’s own story on the relaunch:

The look and functionality of all digital platforms — the website, tablet app, new Facebook app and new mobile apps — also have been overhauled to facilitate bigger images and graphic-driven stories while presenting them in “a fun, engaging” way, the company says.

The web and tablet platform will also feature live video coverage, interactive weather mapping and more instant analysis and commentary. New user-control features will make customizing the pages easier for consumers.

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