The main reference I found to the amount of time it took came from a Q&A[1] that appeared after it was published:
> [...]I spent much of the summer getting to know the people involved (sometimes with the photographer Ruth Fremson and the video journalist Catherine Spangler in tow) and the loved ones left behind, and attended the 2012 International Snow Science Workshop in September to help understand the world of avalanches and snow. And I started writing, which took a few weeks. By then, The New York Times had committed to telling this story through multimedia. And, as I hope people see in the credits at the bottom of the article, it was quite a team of graphic artists and designers and editors. Unlike me, they all had plenty of other duties this fall — the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy — but really devoted much of the past month to the publication.
Based on that, it seems the NYT is claiming it took a team working part time—in an unusually busy news time—about a month to complete. The credits for Snow Fall list 11 people on the design team: to get to 200 hours, the minimum needed to qualify as "hundreds", it'd be 18 hours per person. Plausible, but it would be better if he could cite that claim.
I couldn't find any claim to the part about "hand-coding" (whatever that means). In fact, in a different Q&A[2], they mention using a mixture of prior custom work and off-the-shelf components:
> We used a number of custom components that we’ve used in other projects in the past like the modal slideshows. But some tools/libraries include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address. In triggering scroll-based events, I took inspiration from Remy Sharp’s inview jquery plugin.
> [...]I spent much of the summer getting to know the people involved (sometimes with the photographer Ruth Fremson and the video journalist Catherine Spangler in tow) and the loved ones left behind, and attended the 2012 International Snow Science Workshop in September to help understand the world of avalanches and snow. And I started writing, which took a few weeks. By then, The New York Times had committed to telling this story through multimedia. And, as I hope people see in the credits at the bottom of the article, it was quite a team of graphic artists and designers and editors. Unlike me, they all had plenty of other duties this fall — the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy — but really devoted much of the past month to the publication.
Based on that, it seems the NYT is claiming it took a team working part time—in an unusually busy news time—about a month to complete. The credits for Snow Fall list 11 people on the design team: to get to 200 hours, the minimum needed to qualify as "hundreds", it'd be 18 hours per person. Plausible, but it would be better if he could cite that claim.
I couldn't find any claim to the part about "hand-coding" (whatever that means). In fact, in a different Q&A[2], they mention using a mixture of prior custom work and off-the-shelf components:
> We used a number of custom components that we’ve used in other projects in the past like the modal slideshows. But some tools/libraries include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address. In triggering scroll-based events, I took inspiration from Remy Sharp’s inview jquery plugin.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/q-a-the-avalanche-a... [2]: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made...