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Visually Depicting Covid-19 Losses

Posted on Friday, February 26, 2021 at 3:50 PM

In the news: This week, a grim milestone in the pandemic presents design challenges for news outlets.

How can a newspaper or magazine with limited editorial space drive home the enormity of 500,000 Covid-19 casualties in the US? In the past week, several prominent news outlets have published stunning infographics to depict the magnitude of the loss.

On the front page of the Sunday (February 21) New York Times is a chart of nearly half a million dots, one for each American who has died of Covid-19. At a glance, it looks like a standard gradient chart, with the darkest portion at the bottom, occupying a width of half the column space (three columns) on the page. Designers Lazaro Gamio and Lauren Leatherby created the graphic, and Gamio tells the Times: “‘I think part of this technique, which is good, is that it overwhelms you -- because it should.’”

Elsewhere, Artur Galocha and Bonnie Berkowitz of the Washington Post presented three visual analogies, which Roy Peter Clark of Poynter.org sums up thusly: “To take a half million people on a bus tour would require 9,804 buses, a caravan that would stretch almost 95 miles, the distance from New York to Philadelphia. To honor the names of the dead on a memorial, you would need blocks of marble eight times taller than ones that honor the 58,000 dead from the Vietnam War. If you buried the dead in a single cemetery you would need one just as big as the one that exists at Arlington.”

See the NYT graphic here and the Washington Post graphic here.

Also Notable

Australia’s Facebook News Blackout Ends

A standoff between Facebook and the Australia government that temporarily barred Australians from seeing seeing or sharing news on the social network ended this week. Rod McGuirk of the AP reports that Facebook had “struck a deal with the government on proposed legislation that would make digital giants pay for journalism.” The temporary blackout didn’t just affect Facebook news access; McGuirk says that “the blackout also cut access -- at least temporarily -- to government pandemic, public health and emergency services, fueling outrage.” The story comes at a time when internet giants such as Facebook and Google are under increased pressure to pay journalists and publishers for the content that appears on their networks. Read more here.

Journalists Versus Climate Disinformation

The ongoing crisis in the aftermath of Texas’s unprecedented winter storm is presenting journalists with unique challenges. Andrew McCormick of CJR.org says of the controversy: “Against all evidence the anti-climate political right was grousing about windmills and blaming a Green New Deal that doesn’t yet exist.” Pundits such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity amplified this disinformation to their audiences, making it more difficult for fact-checkers to counter the damage, especially given concurrent media distractions such as Texas senator Ted Cruz’s trip to Mexico. McCormick advises journalists trying to regain control over the narrative to “lead with the facts, not punditry” and “shirk the habit of framing everything as a two-sided debate.” Read more here.

A 300-Year US Magazine Retrospective

This week, the Grolier Club in New York City launched a temporary exhibit called “Magazines and the American Experience.” The exhibit features collector Steven Lomazow’s trove of magazines from the 1700s through today -- 83,000 issues total, reports Nora McGreevy of Smithsonian magazine. Among other things, it features coverage of major politicians and artists, slavery and abolitionism, and other notable historic events. Ultimately, McGreevy says: “As Lomazow himself points out, the exhibition also functions as an ode to the long cultural production of a now-struggling industry. Thanks in part to a revolution in digital advertising and the rise of social media, magazines -- and the media industry writ large -- now face challenging economic constraints. But in the heyday of print advertisements, magazine flourished and writers reaped the benefits.” Read more about the exhibit here.

Print Magazine Closure: Saveur

Influential food magazine Saveur has shuttered its print edition after several years of struggle. Most recently, the title was purchased by Bonnier in October 2020. Chris Crowley of GrubStreet.com writes that the closure comes “at a time of some transition in food media, including the rise of more independent magazines like Whetstone and a boom in newsletters bringing in different voices and perspectives not always given space.” Read more here.

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