The Problem with NY Times COVID-19 Reporting — a Design Investigation
Introduction
Over the past few months, I’ve been checking the New York Times website and mobile app daily. I’ve noticed the user interface change as COVID-19 took its course. They began dedicating a full section for COVID-19 related news, added sections based on state openings, the economy and unemployment. As a reader, I’ve enjoyed seeing how the interface has changed to fit the needs of its users, however, I think it could be better.
For as long as I’ve been reading the New York Times, I’ve always been impressed with their data visualization team. They continuously innovate to provide new ways of representing complicated data sets in digestible ways for the human eye. However, there is one design decision they have made that has irked me to no end: the COVID-19 cases and death count statistics.
Displaying Death Statistics
I’ve always been interested in how the media conveys information about death to their audiences. As a designer, and as a human being, I understand that death is a complicated topic that needs to be carefully handled because of its highly emotional nature. I also understand that it is a challenge to convey information about death in a sensitive manner through static mediums like newspapers, where there is little human element.
The Design Analysis
With this said, I believe that the New York Times has done an inadequate job with handling the display of COVID-19 death information, and I would like to explain through a design analysis.
When a user opens up the New York Times on their web browser, they don’t even need to scroll to see the bright statistics about new COVID-19 cases, and new COVID-19 deaths. Using bright colors like red and orange, the user’s eye is naturally drawn to that part of the page that shows new COVID-19 cases. Right underneath that number, in a dark grey color, is the number of new deaths per day. Additionally, they put a percent change and a “trend” arrow next to the death count. The number of deaths is generally relatively smaller than the number of new cases per day, which further devalues the importance of the grey number of deaths.
As a designer, I feel like this is desensitizing death to the user. In the picture I provided, there were 1,349 new deaths in one day. These deaths could have been prevented if the government had handled the pandemic appropriately from the beginning. New York Times users check this statistic every day, and being able to quickly see the latest number of people who died the day before further devalues the importance of that number. These are 1,349 families who have lost a family member, in just one day.
I fear that the mere placement of these statistics “normalizes” COVID-19 deaths, when in fact, they are anything but “normal”. Again, these are preventable deaths due to mismanagement of government. Desensitizing death is extremely harmful to the general population that begins to see death in a numerical sense, rather than in an emotional sense.
The Solution
So, what’s the solution? As a starting point, the New York Times should remove this death count from their initial landing page. Move it to a page where these deaths are honored, and where we can see stories about the people who died, and their family members. As someone who has experienced death very intimately this month, I feel that the more we hear about people’s stories, and the effects of these deaths, the more seriously we will take COVID-19 and the more actions we will take.
As a reader, I’ve tried to find more stories about the people’s whose lives have been lost to this pandemic. I found a really great article by the New York Times about how the children who have lost two parents to COVID-19 are dealing with the aftermath. We need more stories like this. Turning death into a grey number with a trend arrow next to it for a preventable pandemic is harmful and detrimental to society. New York Times, please change the way you do this, stand up for the people’s whose lives have been unfairly lost.
Edit 9/28/2020: Since writing this article, the New York Times has published a really awesome series honoring those who have died during the pandemic. If you have time to read through the stories, please do!
