COVID-19: The New York Times prints names of lives lost to COVID-19 on front page

COVID-19: The New York Times prints names of lives lost to COVID-19 on front page .

The newspaper printed 1,000 names on its Sunday May 24 front page, noting the list represents just 1% of the total loss of lives in the U.S. The front page also says, “They were not simply names on a list. They were us.” Read this and more.

Roughly five months after the first US coronavirus case was reported, the US was set to hit the grim death toll of 100,000 in a matter of days. The Times’ front page represented just 1% of those deaths.Each of the names on the front page was accompanied with a miniature obituary, noting each person’s name age, city and state, and brief facts about their lives.

The newspaper — a team of editors and three graduate student journalists — compiled the details from online obituaries and death notices that included COVID-19 as the cause of death, according to The Times.Simone Landon, an assistant editor on the graphics desk, told the newspaper it was important to reckon with the 100,000-person figure. She said she and her colleagues found that “both among ourselves and perhaps in the general reading public, there’s a little bit of a fatigue with the data,” and sought to create a front page that would visualize the extent of the loss.