The New York Times’ striking presentation of the nearly 100,000 American lives lost due to COVID-19 caused audiences to stop and reflect this Memorial Day weekend.
We reached out to assistant editor of the Graphics desk Simone Landon to get the story behind the project — a major collaboration among the Graphics, National and Design desks.
“Once we seized on the concept, we just went with it,” she said. “It was emotionally taxing work at times, but I think we all felt grateful to ‘meet’ so many people from all walks of life.”
What was your process for collecting the names? What factors did you consider for those individuals (age, gender, race, military, etc.) and newspapers to feature? How many did you collect total and how did you narrow the selection down?
Landon: We started by trying to gather as many obituaries and paid death notices as we could in the time we had. We searched news reference sites like Factiva and Nexis and the obituary site Legacy.com for mentions of deaths related to coronavirus and did some more targeted searching on the sites of certain news outlets. Some of the names came from another project in the Times, Those We’ve Lost, and from paid death notices that appeared in the Times. A huge amount of the research credit belongs to Alain Delaquérière, a veteran in the Times research department. We also searched in Spanish-language and Chinese-language media for obituaries or articles about those who died.
We probably collected about 1,500 obituaries in the end, but some were duplicates (usually more prominent people who were covered in multiple outlets) or the details were difficult to confirm. We wanted to use as many as we could, even when there wasn’t a lot of information about the person to go on. We did try for some geographic diversity, though we also kept in mind where the outbreaks were worst, so many people were from the New York area, Chicago and Washington state.
Was Memorial Day weekend always the target publishing date or was the 100K death toll mark the main factor?
Landon: This was a somber coincidence. We conceived the project to mark the grim milestone in coronavirus deaths, and it just happened to nearly coincide with Memorial Day.
It’s a rare moment for the NYT to publish a front page without an image. Can you describe how you decided to go with the list of names rather than a grid of images?
Landon: Images can be hugely powerful, of course, but at this scale we wouldn’t have had much room for each face, and we thought it might be challenging to relate to a wall of unfamiliar faces. Tom Bodkin, the Times creative director, got behind the project early on and pushed for the full frontpage treatment. Once we seized on the concept, we just went with it, but in retrospect I’d say we were also faithful to the source material. There’s a reason obituaries are written in words (though they often include photos). It’s not about what the people looked like, but about how we remember them — their careers, their triumphs, their relationships, their hobbies, how much we loved them. That’s all best expressed in language.
How did you edit the micro-bios?
Landon: Once we had the initial list, a half-dozen editors read every obituary to choose the very short lines that went into the piece. Most are direct quotes, or lightly edited. I was struck again and again by how eloquent people can be when memorializing their loved ones — so much love and grace comes through. We did look hard for variety and tried to capture a unique thing mentioned about each person.
Because we were keeping everything to a sentence or less, we ended up leaving so much out. It’s difficult to capture a whole life in a handful of words, or even the couple-hundred-word tributes we were drawing from. It was emotionally taxing work at times, but I think we all felt grateful to “meet” so many people from all walks of life.
How did you pick the newsroom team to work on the project?
Landon: We do a lot of collaborating across desks and this project came together fairly organically between Graphics, National and Design. Every desk has been covering the virus nonstop, so we’re all familiar with the subject, and we all keep looking for new ways to approach the story. We kept adding people as we realized the volume of material we had to sift through. I’m grateful that Archie Tse, the graphics director, and Marc Lacey, the national editor, were supportive early on and put as many resources behind the project as we needed. It was Marc’s idea to get Dan Barry to write the essay accompanying the project that pushes us to step back and take it in.
Andrew Sondern is the very talented designer responsible for the front page (and inside) treatment, and we talked to him early on. Matt Ruby, Eden Weingart and Gabriel Gianordoli are tremendous designers and developers on the digital side who spent many late nights honing the online presentation, where we knew we wanted to represent all 100,000 in some way. They picked up the concept immediately and really struck the right tone in execution.
I mentioned Alain, who has a lot of experience researching people. Annie Daniel, a software engineer, was involved early to help collect and organize the material. Also on the technical side, Jon Huang and Rich Harris in the Graphics department set up a system to make it easier to review the obituaries and edit them for the final product. Laz Gamio (also in Graphics) and Clinton Cargill (on National) were key to making the whole thing go. Other editors from Graphics and National joined as we went along. We were also very lucky to have the help of three graduate student researchers and a couple of freelancers. Almost everything we do is a team effort, and this was no exception.
What has the response been so far about the impact?
Landon: The response from readers has been really strong. The most important responses, for me, are the folks who saw their loved ones in the list and reached out, and those who did not but shared the piece or left comments with their loved ones’ names and a short sentence, essentially adding them to the list and making them part of the project, too.