I’ve only just caught up with this New York Times series from last week by David Rohde, the reporter who was held for seven months by the Taliban last year but made an unlikely escape. It’s a gripping tale on many levels, but I thought I’d highlight here the techniques employed by the newspaper to tell it. It’s available both as a five-part interactive video series, in which he tells he story to the camera, and as a straight text piece, which he wrote.

For me, it’s an excellent example of how new storytelling techniques don’t always produce better results than old ones . In this case the video pieces suffer from a lack of compelling pictures to go with the story – while Rohde himself is not the greatest on-camera presence. And despite the fact that the NYT multimedia team has pulled out all the stops with a 3D reconstruction of the escape, I think the text piece remains the far more compelling and information-rich piece of journalism.