With this newspaper, the extraordinary events of the last few months have demanded headlines which take up space.
Every once in a while, a news headline calls out for big, bold font.
This winter, these headlines kept coming. The news since Election Day was dominated by the chaos of the presidential transition and the persistence of a catastrophic pandemic.
You will find vaccine rollouts, economical disasters , political conflicts , evictions, reckonings with racism, and congressional elections that made history.
How can you mark the most important occasions when the news is so relentlessly remarkable? At The New York Times, one way is the make the headlines very big.
A banner headline is typically one which stretches across a newspaper’s front page or site. It utilizes jumbo letters and bold type to communicate the magnitude of a news item, pushing different posts out of its own way.
There have been a lot of banner headlines on the front pages of The Times this winter — far more than usual, based on Tom Jolly, ” the newspaper’s print editor.
“It’s remarkable,” he said. “It’s definitely a reflection of our planet, and all the major news events that have made 2020 so memorable — and therefore are making 2021 memorable, too.”
Here are a few of the big ones.
On Election Day, the front page of the print paper represented the angst of a state that knew, before polling places were closed, it likely had a fraught few days — or weeks — of vote-counting ahead.
When former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the lead in Pennsylvania, the fog of a too-close-to-call election began to lift. He appeared convinced about his chances, but President Trump was spreading false promises of rampant voter fraud.
Four days after voting day, The Times called the election. Mr. Biden won, having fulfilled a decades-long ambition in his third bid for the White House. His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was the first girl to become vice-president elect.
Following Mr. Trump falsely claimed that widespread voter fraud had stolen success from him, The Times called election officials in every state. They said there were no irregularities which had affected the outcome of the election.
Mr. Trump battled the results of the election at a state-by-state litigation campaign. When the Supreme Court refused a lawsuit from Texas in December, it was a critical blow to the president and his allies.
The United States began a huge coronavirus vaccine rollout in December, and healthcare employees were among the very first to find the shots. They arrived just as the country surpassed 300,000 coronavirus deaths, even a toll larger than every other nation.
In January, an sound recording of a phone call disclosed that Mr. Trump had driven the elections officer in Georgia to”locate” votes which could help the president win the state.
The invasion, which left five people dead, had no parallel in modern American history.
Two days following the siege from Mr. Trump’s supporters, Democrats put the groundwork to impeach the president for its second time. It was an all-out effort by furious Democrats, backed by a few Republicans, to force Mr. Trump to leave office in disgrace.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump became the first American president to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans joined with Democrats in the House to charge him with “incitement of insurrection.”
The only word topping the print newspaper on Jan. 14 –“Impeached” — has been discussed by several top Times editors in conversations that went late at night, Mr. Jolly said. It was an”affair headline,” he added, which is bolder than a banner and is generally reserved for presidential elections success.
But this is a season unlike any other. Over the previous three weeks, this ultra-dramatic layout has been used three times. And counting.
