Who Gets to ‘Snow-Fall’ or ‘Jockey’ at The Times, and Why?

At Wired magazine’s annual business conference in New York last May, the executive editor Jill Abramson made the observation that at The Times, “snow-fall” had become a verb.

“Everyone wants to snow-fall now, every day, all desks,” she said.

The reference was to the elaborate Pulitzer-winning multimedia effort from late last year, “Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” As The New Republic wrote this week, the project “marked a significant shift in the culture of the newsroom, where digital blockbusters are now seen as a way to become a star.”

Now there’s a new effort in the “Snow Fall” genre: “The Jockey,” written by Barry Bearak, and detailing - through words, and Chang W. Lee’s photographs and integrated video - the experiences and career of Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in America. The writing approaches poetry at times - “the serene musicality of hoofbeats and hard breathing” at a sunrise workout - and the visuals are inventive and absorbing. You can feel the thoroughbreds surging out of the gate and the steam coming off their coats.

It took many months - and many talented people - to produce. Like “Snow Fall,” the project has been widely praised, and has brought readers and viewers to The Times that it wouldn’t normally have. Jason Stallman, the sports editor, said that numbers for “The Jockey” paled in comparison to those for “Snow Fall,” which everyone knew going in; it’s a different kind of project, he said, which appeared in the summer doldrums. He added, “Chasing ‘Snow Fall’ numbers is a fool’s errand.” That project initially generated more than 3.5 million page views.

As Ad Age wrote, it’s also a way for The Times to bring in a new kind of revenue and to experiment with more elegant ways of weaving custom ads into the overall project design. The revenue potential of video production is very much on the mind of the leadership at The Times these days.

Is the finished project - gorgeous as it is - really worth it, from a journalistic standpoint?

A reader, Bruce Lambert, from Hempstead, N.Y., who is a retired Times reporter, has a reaction to both projects that I found worth considering:

Despite having no personal interest in skiing, I found “Snow Fall’s” writing, layout, photos and graphics to be engrossing, almost sweeping me away like the powerful avalanche it portrayed. But after finishing it, I wondered why so much talent, effort and expense was devoted to the story of a few elite athletes in a luxury sport who knowingly and needlessly took risks that turned out so badly.

After a minute or two of the equally visually impressive “The Jockey,” I decided not to expend any more time on this profile of an apparently superb rider in the sport of kings; no offense to those who prepared it so well. Especially at a time of constrained journalistic resources, why has The Times so far chosen only limited feature topics?

Why not, instead, pick an issue of far greater import â€" global warming, the Great Recession, income-wealth disparity, gun safety, stop-and-frisk, health care financing, Middle East turmoil or fracking, to name a few possibilities.

On Monday, I asked Dean Baquet, the managing editor, why the two major multimedia extravaganzas so far have been sports-related feature stories, and whether - as Mr. Lambert wondered - they are the most sensible use of resources. Each of the projects, he acknowledged, “took many, many months to produce” and involved writers, editors, graphics and technology people.

“Sports is very visual,” he said, in a way that “document-driven” investigative work is not. Sports stories offer narrative storytelling possibilities that lend themselves to this kind of effort. And the topics are “less competitive” in nature, allowing a long gestation period.

How well will this approach hold up over time?

Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo offered this prediction: “I suspect that years from now, we’ll look back at ‘Snow Fall,’ ‘The Jockey’ and their copycats in the same way we now regard 1990s-era dancing hamster animations â€" as an example of excess, a moment when designers indulged their creativity because they now have the technical means to do so, and not because it improved the story or readers’ understanding of it.”

Even Mr. Baquet admitted that such efforts “could have been handled in 900-word feature stories,” not 10,000 word extravaganzas. But he strongly believes they are worth the resources. Editors pitch ideas at the twice-monthly enterprise meeting, and a group of editors and graphics people make the decisions on who gets to “snow-fall,” with an eye to what projects lend themselves best to the new approach, are worthwhile, and stand a realistic chance of succeeding, given all the elements. Many more are proposed than accepted, he said.

The Times has no intention of slowing down, but the pace isn’t particularly fast either. The plan is to produce “four or five” such projects a year, Mr. Baquet said. “We’re just learning how to do them. We’re not capable to doing zillions yet.” One that’s in the works is on a very serious news-related subject, he said, but did not want to go into detail.

My take: I like the innovation â€" it is nothing short of necessary. And the projects are beautifully executed.

But I’m with Mr. Lambert in hoping that when The Times is fully up to speed, editors will make room, more often than not, for journalistic subjects that really matter, and to balance news value with the expenditure of resources.