The New York Times Fights "Snow Fall" Fatigue With More Snow Falls––And It's Working

This weekend's New York Times Sunday magazine hits us, yet again, with another "Snow Fall"–esque multimedia feature. The difference? This time, you may actually want to read the whole thing. Similar highly stylized Times projects, while very pretty, "are bad for the web and bad for readers,"critics have argued, with too many bells and whistles that ultimately overwhelm readers.

"A Game of Shark and Minnow," however, is an evolution in the format, as the Times responds to the backlash to the Snow Fall–ification of the Internet, with better versions of Snow Fall. "I think we're aware of those criticisms with the other projects and it's in our heads for sure," Steve Duenes, the Times's associate managing editor, told Fast Company.

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"Those criticisms" for Snow Fall–type projects come in two variants: price and utility. Snow Fall required lots of resources: The Times brought in a physicist to recreate the avalanche, for example. Not even the paper of record can afford that level of production on a regular basis. Since the current media business model can't support all that went into Snow Fall, we've seen the more accessible elements of the piece show up in other Times projects (and all over the Internet). Most notably, parallax scrolling, the design element that makes different layers on the page move at different rates. (Fast Company used the feature in this article about unplugging from the Internet.) That trend, however, has started to feel gimmicky as more sites have adopted it.

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