The term "Snowfall story" comes from "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek," a six-part feature published by The New York Times in December 2012 and written by John Branch. The piece reconstructed a fatal avalanche in Washington State's Cascade Mountains through embedded video interviews, 3D terrain flyovers, animated weather simulations, and parallax-scrolling photography woven into the narrative text. It won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a Peabody Award, and it quickly became shorthand in newsrooms for ambitious, design-driven longform.
After Snow Fall, "to Snowfall" became a verb among editors, meaning to produce a story with similarly rich multimedia integration. Outlets including The Guardian ("Firestorm," 2013), ESPN, National Geographic, Pro Publica, and the BBC developed comparable formats. Tools such as Shorthand, Atavist, and in-house CMS extensions emerged partly to lower the cost of producing them, since the original Snow Fall reportedly required months of work by developers, designers, graphics editors, videographers, and the reporter.
For researchers and MUN delegates, Snowfall stories are notable because they often serve as accessible primary explainers on complex policy or crisis topics — climate disasters, refugee routes, conflict zones, public-health emergencies — combining on-the-ground reporting with visualized data. They can be cited as journalistic sources, though analysts should still verify underlying figures against original datasets or official documents.
Critiques of the format include:
- Cost and scalability — production budgets often run into the tens of thousands of dollars per piece.
- Accessibility — heavy scripts and autoplay video can exclude users on low-bandwidth connections or assistive technologies.
- Link rot and archiving — interactive elements frequently break over time, complicating citation.
Despite these issues, the Snowfall format remains a benchmark for digital narrative journalism and has shaped how outlets present investigative and explanatory work online.
Example
In 2013, The Guardian published "Firestorm," a Snowfall story about an Australian family surviving a bushfire on Tasmania's Dunalley peninsula, widely cited as the format's first major imitation.
Frequently asked questions
From 'Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,' a 2012 New York Times feature by John Branch that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
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