Data Visualization & Infographics

Big News

2020 was a rough year. But how did it stack up, historically? Big News is a zoomable collection of all banner headlines appearing in The New York Times from its founding through the end of 2020.

Inspired by a tweet, I collected the front pages by scraping the TimesMachine archive and used Mechanical Turk to crowdsource the identification of banner headlines. To build the visualization, I adapted code from Vikus Viewer.

And it turns out 2020 had more banner headlines than any year since World War II.

Zoomed out view of the entire span of years

Slightly zoomed in view of newspaper front pages.