What the Amazing Work of "Snow Fall" Means for Media

The New York Times' Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek has been rightly hailed as an incredible feat of journalism. If you haven't read the tale of groupthink and death among expert back-country skiiers in Washington’s Cascades, you should. Actually, "read" is the wrong verb. This is an immersive experience, with sounds, video, diagrams, animation and visual footnotes merged with John Branch's terrific story telling.

I read it Saturday night, glued to my computer, and had the same sensation at the end as I do when the lights go up after a great movie: body still tense, mind turning, unclear over how much time had passed.

In fact, there was only one thing I thought was wrong with the piece — terribly wrong. The ads. Thoughout the story, a black bar would appear and a centered banner ad would display. In my case, selling me a truck. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm called the ad experience "ugly, not very useful, poorly integrated." Others were less generous.

The whole experience set off the usual handwringing among media watchers (me, included). Is this the future of longform journalism? If so, it's going to require the business side to be as inventive as the editorial side. The story took six months to report, and a team of at least 17 to put together (and that's not counting editors, copy editors, designers and more who are uncredited). Serving a standard targeted ad against the product feels like the producers of Zero Dark Thirty paying for the movie by having Jared from Subway do a walk on in Abbottabad.

But I'd rather have the NYT experiment on the journalism side and let the ad part lag than the other way around. And some startups are showing that it's possible to pay for journalism that goes beyond the inverted pyramid.

The Atavist, a digital magazine and publishing platform backed by Barry Diller and Andreessen Horowitz (among others), is doing exactly that: publishing great content that allows you to dig deeper into the story. It gets around the issues of trying to persuade advertisers to be creative by simply not bothering with them. "It makes the stories cleaner and it means we don't have to have an advertising sales force," says Nick Thompson, one of the co-founders and the editor of the NewYorker.com [and a writer here]. "But it does mean people have to decide the stories are worth paying for."

The Atavists's stories are all original. The Awl, a pop culture website, goes further: Its app shows just a handful of great stories that ran free during the week. The app merely pulls the best, strips them of their ads and makes them easy and enjoyable to read. And for that convenience, the reader pays about $40 per year

Readers want great journalism and they'll pay for it. They may not pay enough to support the entire New York Times, but that doesn't have to be the case. This is a future of journalism, not the future. I don't want my fiscal cliff stories told with ambient sounds or diagrams of John Boehner's path to the White House. There will be some pieces we'll pay for, others will be sponsored — and they'll be sponsored in a million different ways. Smart advertisers have always figured out ways to attach themselves to things that consumers love.

Over at Pando Daily, Sarah Lacy called Snow Fall the last gasp of big media, the NYT "throwing one hell of a punch [saying] This is what a several hundred person staff and a massive brand name can do, bitches!" I'd buy that if this involved incredible foreign reporting or covered treacherous legal ground — arenas that independent journalists still can't tackle alone. But Snow Fall is just great story telling told in an inventive way. Others are already doing the same, though with less fanfare.

The readers clearly want more of this kind of work; journalists – and the business side — will accomodate.