Special projects are coming back

When I was in school, one of the most exciting things in media was a format we called “special projects”: large interactive longreads that combined text with video, audio, and infographics.

I still remember the thrill of reading “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” the New York Times piece that won a Pulitzer in 2013.

Back then, only major outlets could afford the format. It took more than journalism — coding a site from scratch, building graphics and animations, designing charts and diagrams.

That’s no longer true. Ilya Inozemtsev single-handedly produces large research pieces with custom-built websites: about jokes, or, most recently, about rappers’ vocabularies. And I built a full website for my podcast on my own, in a little over a week.

Vibe coding opens the door to every kind of interactive and multimedia project. It’s especially exciting for niche ideas nobody would have touched before, simply because they’d never pay off.

Add the fatigue with feeds and algorithms, add the steady flow of good journalists leaving legacy media to go solo — and I expect the next few years to bring a new dawn for special projects