Snowfall multimedia: narrative or grab-bag?

99 Designs highlights the Guardian NSA article I liked as a bad example of a Snowfall-eque multimedia feature:

Rather than embed each speaker’s testimony in a single video, however, it breaks them up into many short fragments which play automatically as a reader scrolls, distributing them evenly throughout the article. Multimedia at its most interruptive.

I strongly disagree with many of their assessments, if only because they seem to think that the textual elements of such features should be separate from – and consumed separately to – the video and graphical elements. I’m in favour of weaving them together as one narrative.