About the Project
This competition asks serious questions about the definition of digital journalism, and as the field has grown up, some answers have come into view. Innovation and the smart use of new capabilities are vital best practices, as are compelling multimedia storytelling and effective community engagement. And as digital journalism matures, there is greater room for restraint in our presentations of serious material. Sometimes, an uncomplicated stacking of images can be the best digital format for bearing witness to events that demand sober reflection. The New York Times has imbued its digital practices with serious purpose, delivering investigative results or devastating visual evidence — or finding pathways to discovery and delight. The best examples are here in our entry for general excellence in online journalism:
- A Times investigation used aerial imagery and artificial intelligence to detect bomb craters that showed that one of Israel’s biggest bombs was used routinely in south Gaza.
- New Yorkers helped us map the neighborhoods of the city. We used advanced geospatial analysis to turn more than 48,000 reader drawings into a lucid and striking depiction of the block-by-block nature of neighborhood boundary and change.
- Teen mental health is in crisis. Phones and social media are rewiring teen brains. Girls are disproportionately affected. Yet few of the many headlines about the state of teenage mental health get at the experience of being a young person. How do apps and group chats and social media collide with things like puberty, self-consciousness, angst, body image — and geometry? That’s the question we set out to answer in Being 13 — a vibrant feature about three girls, from three parts of the country.
- Shortly before ending his life, 18-year-old Wyatt Bramwell filmed a final request for his parents: to donate his brain to research. The high school football player had a sense that his years of playing the sport contributed to his growing depression. Researchers at Boston University later confirmed Wyatt’s suspicion: he had stage 2 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive brain disease caused by repetitive hits to the head.
- C.T.E. is often thought of as an older player affliction. But researchers recently released a comprehensive look at the impact on younger players, and New York Times reporters obtained exclusive access to speak, on camera, with some of the families of these deceased athletes. The result was this intimate multimedia story: They Started Playing Football as Young as 6. They Died in Their Twenties and Thirties with C.T.E.
- Thousands of Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began in response to the attacks of October 7th, 2023. Through the searing and compassionate photographs and reporting of Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, this staggering statistic is transformed into a simple, but deeply humanized portrait of loss, The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children
