I get most of my news, on a day-to-day, “check the site to see what’s going on in the world” kind of way, from the New York Times. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that the site’s coverage relies on more and more interactive features to tell portions of their stories. At this point, there seems to be almost an urgency about them, a feeling that these pieces — stuff like audio slideshows or interactive maps — are really the only way to fully tell a story online.

New York magazine is telling the story of how the Gray Lady started to go digital. One thing that’s striking to me is the breadth of experimentation, even at a place that you would think would be dragged kicking and screaming away from old ways of telling news stories. After the “Casualties of War” featurette, the Times first large, db-backed, user-facing application, they began throwing things at the wall to see what stuck:

Casualties of War won a Malofiej International Infographics Award, and set the stage for experiments with storytelling in the Times voice. There were video features of Darfur’s Generation X and of the “Vows” column; a dizzying tour through the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries; a partnership with the site Bloggingheads, which streams webcam discussions among pundits and activists. Some attempts were downright weird, like the Pogue-o-matic, a hologrammish feature in which an antic David Pogue analyzed new technology. Others fell flat, like TimesPeople, a rudimentary social-networking site.

The success of this kind of stuff has created a “revolution” at the paper, to the point where there’s no longer any real opposition to the idea of telling news stories (at least in part) with interactive features. As always though, the real rub is figuring out how to make it pay:

“In the early days, the attitude ranged from a few early adopters to, at the opposite end, the hostile people,” Jonathan Landman tells me of the cultural transition at the paper. “Now at the adoption end are a lot of people—and at the hostility end, almost nobody. Well, so few it’s of no importance.”

…

If there are readers who question these changes, the mood within the Times suggests that resistance dissolves with surprising swiftness. “Only history will judge whether we should have made the real-estate move we made—but that integration, when the web co-located with the people who made content for the paper, it came at a really opportune moment,” says David Carr, whose Oscars-season Carpetbagger blog was one of the earliest genre-breaking experiments at the website. “We were ready. And it also validated what we had all been thinking, which was, These guys are Timesmen. They have a different skill set, but they share objectives, standards. And behind that came lots of changing metrics on what constitutes success around here.”

I think this quote, from one of the Times online r&d guys says it the best:

“Print is just a device. The New York Times is not just a newspaper, it’s a news organization.” For those who believe these changes are gimmicks, he has no patience: “This isn’t a storm! This isn’t something that’s going to pass! It’s the ice age. People aren’t going to suddenly open their eyes and we’re back in print.”

I hope more newspapers are able to follow the trail the Times has blazed. There’s no substitute out there in NewMediaLand for newspapers yet, and there’s not going to be one for a long time. These organizations have spent so long being the daily voice that talks to people, that there’s an enormous amount of valuable “tribal knowledge” contained in them. They just have to be open to using the new mediums to communicate, to gather ad revenue, to inform. No one else is about to step up and do it for them.