New York Times audio slideshow – Last day in the office …

duckrabbit thinks that The New York Times have established themselves as the most consistently interesting publisher of multimedia on the web. Their online tagline is ‘Breaking News, World News and Multimedia’. It’s clear that they aim to be a global brand, though with the way their revenue is heading the most likely brand they they’ll be is an extinct one.

We still above all else value local, we’re still mainly sheep, we still stick to what we know and most of us live insular, parochial lives because to do anything else is to stretch our brains in so many directions it hurts. Will the New York Times be able to bring in enough revenue to sustain its approach to multimedia? I hope so … a lot of great careers are banking on it.

The skill of the NYT multimedia team is to stick to great and simple design combined with short narrative portraits that rarely stretch beyond three minutes but consistently captivate. They care deeply about photography and it shows because they present photographs better then any other publishing team by a country mile.

The latest piece I’ve come across covers the final day in office of the disgraced American Governor Rod Blagojevich and its a peach. What it does is capture a brief moment in history in a way that straight news simply cannot. Bravo.

“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I came up that way. That was the path that you chose and they won’t let you out.”