Surfline.com

It's pretty exciting when a cool piece of journalism comes from an untraditional soft-news source. Surfline.com is an online resource for surfers to scope out ocean conditions all over the world, check out sweet photos and stay on top of surf news. Other than a vertical drop-down style of navigation that bothers almost every one I know, the site is nicely done. I especially enjoyed "Eye of the Storm," an audio-backed photo story.

Gotta hand it to their staff for presenting some pretty standard-big-blue-wave-tiny-surfer-dude photos in a way that drew me in by adding some audio to the piece. Listening to the surfer being interviewed, I got to hear the actual "surfer slang" accent give some nice details on what it was like for these guys to be towed into enormous, potentially life-threatening waves. This could be the perfect example of a piece that could have been just as easily created using Soundslides, but I assume it is only a matter of time before that software becomes more popular outside of the journalism community.