PUBLIC MARKS with tags storytelling & photographie

My name is Brandon and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. HONY resulted from an idea that I had to construct a photographic census of New York City. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map.

We invited readers to contribute a photograph of someone close to them who died this year. Here are a few that illustrate a story from their lives.

Touch & Discover Create rich images with music, video, sound, text and more. Share and discover deeper stories through images

While Mike has several valid and well argued points, I don’t agree with his basic premise, that Multimedia/web documentaries lose in storytelling. Here’s my answer, Mike. Thanks for being ambitious on the behalf of online storytelling – not many picture editors are!

This will be the first time I’ve written about multimedia here. What prompts this first? I’ve judged a couple competitions lately so had to suffer through a bunch of multimedia pieces as part of the process. Given a choice, I avoid multimedia like the plague. Why? Because most of it sucks. Even the name sucks. A newspaper or magazine or book is multi media: words, design, photography, printing. Even radio is multi media: words and music.

L'espace de travail de Will Self.

With broadband came a new breed of documentaries, educational stories and advertizements that are interactive, rich audio-visual experiences. But until now these projects had to be build from the ground up by people with design and programming skills. Not anymore. Storyplanet wants to introduce an easy way to mix media, design and online services into interactive stories that can be published to multiple platforms and devices.

Photographer Melissa Lyttle explores interesting lives.

Pictory is an online photojournalism magazine that documents love, loss, family, travel, and our lives and culture in big pictures. Anyone can submit a photo story to one of our social documentary themes. We curate the best work from the community into polished photo essays.

Series produced by Sarah Kramer and Alexis Mainland, photographs by Todd Heisler, Interactive development by Tom Jackson

NYTimes.com readers are sending in their photos from around the world. How do you see the recession playing out in your community? What signs of hardship or resilience stand out? How are you or your family personally affected? Creative ways of documenting the changes around you are encouraged.