The next time someone tells you that in-depth journalism on the web is nearly impossible, just show them two new examples that help shatter that myth.

• The Desert One Debacle tells the story of the failed attempt to rescue the hostages at the US embassy in Teheran in 1980. This is the cover story of The Atlantic’s May issue, and on the web it has been enhanced with video, audio, photos, maps and documents. Though I haven’t seen the print version yet, I would guess that the web version conveys a richer understanding and experience of the narrative’s different aspects. Even so, it’s possible to suggest some further improvements: Actually it worked better to read the whole text virtually uninterrupted, then go back to view photos and maps afterwards. That’s probably because the different pop-ups and formats aren’t seamlessly integrated with the main narrative; one idea would be to use more of the screen’s width and embed, if possible, all the different elements on the main page.
• Faces of the Fallen is a database from Adrian Holovaty and the team at the Washington Post, of US military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (actually a new version of an existing database). If the Atlantic story is a classic narrative with a beginning, middle and end, in Faces of the Fallen the user has to construct a narrative of his or her own from the bare facts of name, face, age, incident, home state, military branch. Importantly, each soldier gets an own page, personalizing the war and its consequences. Actually, the database is so optimized for the web of today that you can subscribe to a feed updating you on forthcoming casualties… One comment to the database on Holovaty’s site is relevant: what is missing is the other – Iraqi dead, be it insurgents, soldiers, civilians, foreign terrorists. But one will, of course, encounter them in the WaPo’s general Iraq coverage and analysis.