I collect the entire front section of 6-column headlines of the New York Times.
I have all of the 6-column headlines related to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, all 13 of the 6-column headlines related to the 9/11 attacks, and all of them related to the fall of the Soviet Union.
I have a bric-a-brac, non-complete set of newspapers related to elections, Supreme Court, rulings, and other news events spanning that time period, but I got serious about collecting every single one around late 2011.
Why do I do this? It’s hard to under-estimate my relationship with the physical newspaper produced by the New York Times. I started reading the NYT when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison– sitting in the Student Union with the current paper was the height of intellectual joy for me. I’ve had it delivered to my home, in an unbroken string, regardless of income, since the early 90s.
And I get my cues from their headlines. A 6-column headline is rare– it’s a cue to history, a notification of the importance of what happened yesterday. On the morning of September 25, 2001, when I saw that, for the first time since September 12, there was not a 6-column headline, it felt like the first time I could really breathe.
This year, of our pandemic and shared trauma and striving for justice and slow-motion idiocy and monumental election, the papers have roiled. I have collected them. Here they are in high resolution: NYT Pandemic 6-Column Headlines, March 10 – November 11, 2020 and here’s a video: