‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’: Analysing everyday photography in The New York Times, 2000 to 2020

Over the past two decades, The New York Times have increasingly incorporated visual experimentation in their use of photography, employing art and design strategies for what were once more conventional editorial subjects. The long-held hierarchy between text and image has been disrupted, with images taking the lead. Employing quantitative and qualitative methods, my study examines the Times’ ‘front page’—an archaic artefact that remains an intense source of scrutiny for editors despite the digital transition—with a dataset related to 240 front pages from January 2000 to January 2020. This ‘image-first’ approach, however, is not reflected in its digital archive, and obstructions to ‘reading’ the image reflect a wider, unstable financialisation of culture that has equally intensified over the last two decades.