The New York Times

About the Project

Newsrooms are using digital tools to dazzling effect, but the most important measure of success is the payoff for the audience when these innovations transform storytelling. Many people want and trust news that they can watch, curate or engage with through powerful visuals, illuminating data sets, immersive interactives and arresting presentations. Such journalism creates a user experience that feels both authoritative and authentic. Digital tools and human ingenuity led to some of the best online pieces last year at The New York Times, across breaking news, enterprise, culture coverage and investigations. These pieces had considerable impact: showing people the truth about devastating events, helping people see inside opaque issues, and delighting them with a new way of thinking about movies. This journalism delivered memorable payoffs for our audience. Here are the best examples in our entry for general excellence in online journalism.

• A Times visual investigation used a frame-by-frame analysis of video footage to reveal flawed decisions by federal officers that led to the killing of Alex Pretti and contradict the statements of federal officials about his death.
• After predawn flash floods in Texas devastated a girls’ summer camp and the surrounding region, The Times used videos, photos, reconstructions, computerized simulations, drone footage, weather data and much more to capture what words alone could not. This digital-first storytelling illuminated crucial details like why no warning systems had been installed and why summer camp cabins had been built in known flood zones.
• Times journalists – one of them a trained architect – scrutinized plans for President Trump’s proposed White House ballroom and drew on interviews to create 3-D models and diagrams to show how the project was being rushed through review and guide our users through critics’ objections to the ballroom plans.
• A Times collaboration across culture, graphics, multimedia and visual desks produced one of our biggest audience favorites of the year, The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century. We polled more than 500 filmmakers, stars and influential film fans to vote for their 10 best movies since Jan. 1, 2000. We gave people many ways to engage with the choices: they could share their picks with friends, make a list of movies to watch, see how their favorite actors and directors voted, play games to rank genre films, vote for their own lists and see how fellow readers voted.

With the Justice Department’s disclosures about Jeffrey Epstein and his network, the newsroom confronted roughly 3 million pages, 1.1 million emails and 200,000 images and videos. In this roundtable, Times journalists and engineers lay out how we augmented DocTools — its in-house document platform — with new A.I.-driven tools that allowed reporters to semantically search images and videos. We also built the “Epstein Files Engine,” an A.I. agent that responded to any question about the corpus. Powered by our duplicate-detection algorithm, it contextualized findings and delivered citation-rich leads about key individuals and storylines within minutes.