More good interactive Olympic stuff online from the
New York Times: How could I resist this headline: "
The Rise of the Buff Bunny," by former Olympic swimmer
Diana Nyad, now a cross-platform journalist who frequently contributes stories for the
Times. Nyad writes about the double standard for female athletes who pose (sometimes nude) for magazines: "Call me old school, but my feathers were plenty ruffled," she writes about photo layouts of female American Olympians in
FHM and
Playboy. A
companion audio slideshow online by staff writer
Joe Drape takes a somewhat different approach to the Nyad story with photos of soccer star
Brandi Chastain, high jumper
Amy Acuff, and softball players
Jennie Finch and
Lisa Fernandez. There are audio comments from Finch and Fernandez, and Drape summarizes, "It is no longer scandalous or provocative for women to choose where they want to appear in the media and how they want to appear in the media."
There's
also a terrific graphic on Monday's big 200-meter men's freestyle race, won by Australia's
Ian Thorpe, and a wonderful slideshow that relives the event. "Our main focus is to do previews of the big competition of the day,"
Times interactive journalist
Naka Nathaniel told me in an e-mail. "Today,
Juliet Macur is looking at the women's gymnastics competition.
Charlie Hanger is the other fellow from the website here and he's been working with the reporters and the copy desk in New York to do a quick turnaround on the copy. Yesterday,
Lynn Zinser's story on the 200-meter race was on the site 15 minutes after the race was finished." And back in the USA, NBC sat on its television coverage of that big race for more than eight hours. So it's good to know where to look for the journalism -- the news and the immediacy: Online.
