Keeping up with Wall Street culture right this moment is not that easy. Firms that yesterday appeared monolithic are today fragile and too often disappear by the end of the weekend. So I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this interactive multimedia package on The New York Times website.

A major news organization like the Times puts out hundreds of stories amid daily coverage of a major event like the latest developments in the credit and banking crises. This story is an excellent study in how to pull together these existing resources into a comprehensive multimedia package.

The story is laid out against a static blue time-line that sits across the top of the page, uniting and arranging all the different information and media.

Clicking on the ruler’s dividers takes you to new tabs on the time line. The tabs follow a general design principle of text on the left, picture on the right. Apart from photos and graphs, the picture can be a video of someone giving a speech or a Times writer making a comment about what’s going on. The text on the left is a succinct lede summing up the day’s events, supported by links to related stories.

The Times is essentially tapping into its database of existing stories, news video of public speeches, and commentary videos shot by the site’s reporters to cobble together an impressively comprehensive step-by-step account of the credit crisis. Talk about making your core competencies work for you.

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