The New York Times honored the lives lost to the novel coronavirus through a powerful tribute spread on its Sunday front page.
The newspaper paid tribute to the thousands of lives lost by filling their front page with the names of the victims and parts of their obituaries. The headline read, “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” followed by the subheading: “They were not simply names on a list. They were us.”
Though the names fill the whole page and continue onto three additional pages, the tribute highlights just 1 percent of the country’s total losses. As of Sunday morning, the newspaper reports that the total number of deaths is nearing 100,000 as at least 97,059 people have died from COVID-19 related illness.
Simone Landon, assistant editor of the Times‘ Graphics desk, said she wanted to front page to represent the number of losses in a way that “conveyed both the vastness and the variety of lives lost.”
“We knew we were approaching this milestone,” she said in the NY Times story, “The Project Behind a Front Page Full of Names” — the newspaper published the story to explain how the tribute came evolved. “We knew that there should be some way to try to reckon with that number.”
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