Snow Fall & Digital Story Telling
I know, it seems odd to talk of snow at THATCamp Florida, of all places. However, I am fascinated, obsessed even, with the recent New York Times article entitled “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” by John Branch and what it portends for digital media in particular and digital story telling in general. The “article” generated an avalanche of buzz (sorry, couldn’t resist the bad pun), and an amazing number of page views, but it also sparked a conversation about its implications. Some observers claimed that it is a road-map to the future of Journalism and digital story telling, while others were much more skeptical . The focus of the conversation has been on both the masterful way that the story was presented as well as the massive amount of resources required to pull it off.
I know that the New York Times is not your average hometown newspaper, and that their resources far outpace those available to most local print organizations. Nonetheless, “Snow Fall” represents a fascinating look at what the future of digital/“print” media might be. I would love to have yack session to sort out what to make of the importance of this article and the try to assess if it might serve as a model for a more robust future for a news medium that is struggling mightily with how to position itself for the digital future. Might it represent a potent survival strategy for print media or is it a one-off experiment by a media juggernaut that has no relevance to the real-world survival of an endangered medium? How can this model be leveraged by others? What does it mean for other storytellers working in the digital space? Yes, I know that this is very yacky, and not exactly within the traditional realm of the Digital Humanities… but it is what I want to talk about.
