The New York Times’ multimedia series One in 8 Million won an Emmy Award in the “new approaches to documentary” category on Monday night. The series is a collection of stories told with audio and photography that portray everyday New Yorkers.

James Estrin talked with three of the series’ producers : the staff photographer Todd Heisler, the senior multimedia producer Sarah Kramer, and Deputy Photo Editor Meaghan Looram. They accepted the Emmy with the co-producer Alexis Mainland, and Tom Jackson, who designed the Web interface. Jodi Rudoren, Juliet Gorman and Andrew DeVigal were the projects’ editors. David Goodman, Joshua Brustein, Emily Weinstein, Lisa Iaboni, Tanzina Vega, Conrad Mulcahy, Nancy Donaldson, Jeffery DelViscio, Rogene Fisher, Emily S. Rueb, Miki Meek and Catrin Einhorn contributed episodes. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

JE: It strikes me that One in 8 million is the simplest idea possible.

ML: It is. It’s people telling their story to you in their own words. We wanted to do it in a way that was elegant and present the people in a dignified manner.

SK: And we wanted to marry beautiful visuals with beautiful sound.

ML: We all were very aware of wanting to keep it as simple as possible while letting people have the most intimate experience of hearing these people talk about themselves. we didn’t want a lot of distractions.

SK: If you have three minutes, you can only hit, probably at most, three notes, not even three topics, it’s like three building blocks. You can introduce one point, which layers on another point, which layers on another point. As soon as you try to give a whole biography or autobiography, of somebody in three minutes, then you’re failing

JE: So, the leanest storyline?

SK: No, not the leanest storyline. It should be nuanced and it should be surprising and it should have tension. It should have elements that make a good story. But, Jim, you’re a photographer, you’re a father, you’re a husband, you’re a son, all these different things. We can’t hit on all of your thoughts and emotions. You don’t want a lot of just passing phrases on a lot of different topics.

JE: I’m interested in how you approached placing the photos with the audio.

ML: In most cases we had the audio before Todd even shot one frame. Which was a new process for me as an editor and Todd as a photographer. It ended up making the marriage of the audio and the photographs much more seamless.

SK: You knew what you wanted to conjure.

ML: With some characters the audio was incredibly wistful, and that’s a different sort of picture to look for then when the audio was chipper and bright and humorous. It paid dividends later on when we sat down to do the actual pacing with specific pictures.

SK: There was a lot of communication. And I think that was a real luxury that you don’t always have on quicker deadlines.

JE: Some people have said that One in 8 million isn’t news.

TH: That’s the point.

JE: What do you mean?

TH: Well, that it’s not news. It’s not beholden to any event or anything that’s in the news. It’s timeless.

SK: It’s narrative storytelling.

ML: Whether or not there is a breaking news element , these are the lives lived in the city. And in that way it’s documenting what is happening here.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

JE: How does one put photos to audio? How do you look at this?

ML: I did make an effort to sequence the pictures in a way that wasn’t terribly obvious. I tried to use subtle associations. I tend to like photographs matching audio in a way that intimates things instead of showing you exactly what you’re being told. The most important thing is to bare in mind that your viewer can use multiple senses. They’re hearing and seeing and what they’re seeing should not be redundant to what they are hearing. It should build upon the audio, enhance it or augment it or make it feel more poignant but it shouldn’t just repeat it. Because we had spectacular audio the pictures could do their own thing.

JE: Tell me how this marriage between photos and audio came to be.

ML: When Sarah and Lexi came up with this idea of profiling average but extraordinary New Yorkers, we started to think about the imagery that would go with it. Originally we thought it would be a much more audio driven project. We actually talked about just doing five or six images per segment, something visually unified; perhaps a head-to-toe portrait, a detail or two and a tight head. The visuals took a very different direction after Todd started shooting because there was such richness to the photographs. They were irresistible. In the end we did try to keep a very elegant, sort of stately pace to the segment so that you could take in all the great nooks and crannies of Todd’s pictures.

TH: We wanted black and white to be a unifying factor, but you also know that just making a photo black and white does not make it imaginative. I had to think in black and white, and the more I did it, the more I realized that I was doing it. I became much more immersed in that idea. And we also wanted them to be meditative and quiet.

JE: This was such a different approach for a photographer. The audio was already done and you spent very little time on each story. People always assume you spent an enormous amount of time, but you didn’t

TH: You might spend at least a week with most documentary work. The longest ones here were probably an entire day.

ML: That’s why the variety in your pictures is so amazing.

TH: I had to train myself in the beginning to really cover a lot. I think the taxidermist was a good example, because the whole story was just about her apartment and it made me have to look a lot more. Having heard the audio gave me specific cues of things to think about. And you know the audio producers were striving for audio the same way that we strive for great pictures. I was able to just put everything into the photographs and each producer was able to put everything into the audio.

JE: When Sarah came and said, here’s an idea, you couldn’t possibly have seen this, could you have?

ML: I had no idea what it was going to grow into. I didn’t know how much of an investment it was gonna be in terms of our time but also I had no idea that I was going to become so attached to the project and the way that we made it. It’s been nine months since we finished and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t long for it to restart sometimes because I really enjoyed the process, even though it was a lot of work, for all of us. It really felt worthwhile, I mean, I just really believed in it. I still do. I’m really really proud that it is still at a place that people can look at it.

JE: What is the essence of One in 8 million?

SK: It’s an ode to the city. It’s a very small ode done by people who love it and live here. It was an attempt to build a bit of community and make a rather vast place seems a bit smaller and more human. And more intimate.