The New York Times Tries Its Hand At Animated Gifs. It Does Not Go Well.

If Buzzfeed and the Times made a baby, and it had epilepsy, it would look like this: "10 Animated GIFs From London 2012." These gifs are different—they're constructed from rapid fire shots taken by the Times's photographers, rather than from actual moving pictures. It sort of defeats the entire purpose of the medium.

But we stil give them props for trying new things. The Times has put together a number of positively innovative presentations for these Olympics, like their graphic showing every 100m medalist through history, and a similar one for swimming.

Today, winning back all our goodwill after the gif incident, they've charted all the Olympic passes and shots taken by the US women's soccer team's three biggest stars. It's a excellent and stark visualization of the patterns we saw but couldn't process: Alex Morgan's crosses into the box, Carli Lloyd pushing up repeatedly against Japan. A sample:

Nicely done. Quality spatial analysis will always be welcome, as will any new way to digest sports beyond the limits of print. The Times grasps this in a way a lot of old media companies don't, so we're more than willing to deal with the occasional jitterbugging photograph to get to the good stuff.