NYT Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics
We learned a lot from the London 2012 data explosion experience, and after reviewing the time and effort, along with analytics showing how deep our audience went into our extremely detailed results pages, we decided to change our approach to covering the next Olympics: Sochi 2014. By spending less time restructuring the sometimes obtuse format of the IOC's ODF, we were able to focus more on an overall editorial strategy that could serve up detailed results to those core sports fans at the same time. Our new approach had a bonus of greater fidelity to the original XML (via ODF) but we then had to figure out how to make that data easier to work with.
Technically, we decided to store the data in Elasticsearch, a native JSON search engine and database.
The outcome? A compelling Olympics hub with highlights, strong photography and interactive presence, and much of the live results data enhancing our sports reporting coverage. It resonated more with our readers than our previous almost encyclopedic coverage of every lap of every phase in every event for all the sports.