(Today’s film is a 360 VR film experience, and can be tricky to play. You can view the film on your desktop computer with draggable navigation by using the embed above with the Chrome browser. A better experience is on mobile, where “magic window” viewing works in the latest YouTube app for iOS and Android. Clicking this link should bring up the option for YouTube viewing if you have the app installed. For the best experience, pair your phone with a headset like Google Cardboard — headset settings for the film work in the YouTube app on both iOS and Android, or within the NyTimes VR app.)

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Of the many players in the world of VR content, The NyTimes is doing the best work so far at bringing the form to a mass audience. Launched last November, this new division of the “Gray Lady” sent over 1M Google Cardboard sets to their print subscriber base, and have continually updated their content offerings with a mix of original work from their staff, and high profile content partnerships with companies like Within. 

Today’s featured experience is from the NyTimes’ in-house team and their gifted visual reporter, Ben C. Solomon. Solomon first caught my attention with his piece Fighting Ebola Outbreak Street by Street, a piece I Staff Picked during my time at Vimeo, and which went on to win numerous journalism awards, including a Pulitzer, as part of the the paper’s reporting on the crisis. 

His latest piece is titled The Fight For Falluja, and is the result of 5 weeks of embedded reporting in the war-torn city, which was the site of some of the fiercest fighting during the US-lead invasion of Iraq, only to fall into the hands of ISIS in 2014. Recently, Iraqi forces reclaimed the city, and Solomon’s reporting coincides with the lead up to, and aftermath, of this mission. Solomon observes the forces doing the fighting and observes the wreckage of a once-great city hallowed out by war. 

Solomon’s documentary approach is much more reportorial than we generally feature on the site, but is fitting for the NyTimes and its hard journalism tradition. More artistic editorial work, like our recent feature I, Destini, makes its home on the paper’s Opinion page via the Op/Docs strand. While a more engaged storytelling perspective would be welcome here, it is hard to deny the power of Solomon’s efforts at making vividly real the circumstances he witnesses. A particularly horrifying shot places the camera, and thus our perspective, inside a makeshift cell that ISIS soldiers use to house prisoners. The size of a phone booth, the claustrophobia is palpable, reminding us of the Guardian’s piece on solitary confinement, and serving as another notable example of the “empathy” effect that is exciting journalists everywhere to pursue VR in their work. 

The film is a supplement to a massive new journalistic piece released last week. Titled “Fractured Lands” this story is a lengthy longread that seeks to do something no less ambitious than chart the history of the Middle East from WWI to today’s refugee crisis. I just finished reading the article, and despite a commitment of well over an hour, it is time well spent—concise, yet insightful, charting broad historic trends through the eyes of 6 representative interview subjects. The Fight for Falluja covers just a small aspect of this sweeping account, but its inclusion in the article, alongside several photo galleries, is the kind of fusion between old forms and new that we should celebrate coming from our revered news outlets.