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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