[comex]

I don't wholly disagree with your critique, but I'll counter on one point. The Times' videos are not the raw source videos you usually see in blogs, which complement and are given context by the text. Compared to TV news, they do tend to spend more time on source material, but overall they tend to follow its model: interviews, on-scene footage, and narration professionally cut together to make a complete narrative. Like on TV (or, for that matter, professional YouTube creators' channels), the video is the complete experience, a replacement for a textual story, not merely a part of it. And as TV and YouTube demonstrate, this is a perfectly valid way to tell a story which many people appreciate; I, on the other hand, prefer text, because I can consume it much faster. It seems reasonable to me that people should be able to choose between the two media. Which is not to say that more of a fusion between the two precedents isn't possible...

[hackuser]

I think that making the whole experience one medium or the other, all text or all video, is a relic of platforms that only supported one medium, newsprint and TV. Yes, some stories will demand so much of one or the other that maybe using all video or text makes sense, but clearly that's not what's happening.

If the NYT wants to tell stories as effectively as possible, they should be using the most effective tools as needed. Their priorities seem to be elsewhere.