True 💗: The New York Times launches an interactive look at 165 years of wedding announcements

LINK: www.nytimes.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | January 24, 2017

This is The New York Times’ digital path forward

January 17, 2017

The New York Times’ Project 2020 report, released last week, places a big focus on revamping feature sections. Here’s one example of what that might look like: A new interactive series, sponsored by Bravo and running through February 21, that honors the paper’s 165 years of wedding announcements.

The series, “Committed,” taps the paper’s archives to pull out interesting stories; many of the posts link back into Times Machine, the Times’ digital archive, and feature old-timey screenshots. The feature is led by Anya Strzemien, the Times’ digital deputy Styles editor, and will feature writing by Times journalists and authors like Curtis Sittenfeld and Amy Bloom.

Photo by Sam Falk. Used with permission from The New York Times.

The New York Times is unearthing unpublished photos from its archives for Black History Month

February 3, 2016

The first post in the series, fittingly, is about the wedding announcement in the Times’ very first issue, on September 18, 1851, and is written by Lois Smith Brady, a longtime writer of the Times’ Vows column. She talks to the descendants of John Grant and Sarah Mullett, and discovers, among other things, that one of them is David Haskell, the deputy editor of New York magazine. (Media elite bubbles span centuries, it turns out!)

In another post, Times Magazine staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones writes about the wedding announcement of journalist-suffragist-activist Ida B. Wells: “That the nuptials of a black woman, born into slavery 33 years earlier, could make the front page of The Times, speaks to a woman who was, by definition, remarkable.”

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