Who are these rock star guys?
Crack open the new issue of New York magazine and you’ll see this trendy, black-and-white mosaic portrait of these guys:
Photo by Mike McGregor/New York magazine
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So, who are they? The latest in alternative rock bands?
Not hardly. They’re visual journalists at the New York Times. And yes, the New York magazine is giving them the rock-star treatment this week.
From left to right: Aron Pilhofer, Andrew DeVigal, Steve Duenes, Matt Ericson and Gabriel Dance. The magazine calls them “The Renegades” who are “goosing the Gray Lady” by revolutionizing how multimedia graphics are used on the Times‘ web site.
Emily Nussbaum writes:
And yet, even as the financial pages wrote 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.
Despite the swiftness of these changes, certainly compared with other newspapers’, their significance has been barely noted. That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a Xerox of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.
The article is a bit lengthy, but very well-done. Read it here. Now.
A little irony with which to close… see that black box in the upper right?
Yep: This look at the cutting edge of multimedia journalism at The New York Times is brought to you by the print edition of The New York Times.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Graphics are glamorous again! thanks for the tip Charles. Great article and inspiration in these gloomy days.
(btw i think the publication is New York Magazine, not New Yorker, isn’t it?)
January 12th, 2009 at 10:43 am
oops. see that you have already corrected it…
January 12th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Yep — Matt Mansfield caught my brain-fart. I fixed it moments before you posted your comment.
Thanks anyway, though!
January 12th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
My favorite quote was: The proposal was to create a newsroom: a group of developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers, who would work on long-term, medium-term, short-term journalism â€everything from elections to NFL penalties to kind of the stuff you see in the Word Train.” This team would cut across all the desks, providing a corrective to the maddening old system, in which each innovation required months for permissions and design. The new system elevated coders into full-fledged members of the Times’ deputized to collaborate with reporters and editors, not merely to serve their needs.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Love it! Thanks for the link. For the life of me I’ll never understand why the NYT gets so little love from the design blogs when its so consistently forward-looking and inspiring.