How we’re honoring people overlooked by history

Amy Padnani

My name is Amy Padnani, and I'm an editor on the obituaries desk at the "New York Times." Or, as some friends
call me, the angel of death. In fact, people will ask me, "Isn't it depressing, working on obituaries and thinking
about death all the time?" But you know what I tell them? Obits aren't about death, they're
________________________, they're interesting, they're _________________________. Often about something you never
knew. 

Recently, for example, we had the obit for the inventor of the sock puppet. Everyone knows what a sock puppet
is, but have you ever thought about who created it, or what their life was like? Obits are a
_________________________________. An art form, if you will. It's an opportunity for a writer to weave the tale of a
person's life into a beautiful narrative. 

Since 1851, the "New York Times" has published thousands of obituaries. For heads of state, famous
celebrities, even the person who came up with the name on the Slinky. There's just one
problem. _________________________________________________________________________________________________. That's the
impetus behind a project I created called "Overlooked," which tells the stories of marginalized groups of
people who never got an obit. It's a chance for the newspaper to revisit its 168-year existence and fill in the gaps
for people who were, for whatever reason, left out. It's a chance to _____________________________, and to refocus
society's lens on who is considered important. 

I came up with the idea when I first joined Obituaries in 2017. The Black Lives Matter movement was at a rolling
boil, and the ________________________________________ had just started bubbling up again. And at the same time, I
wondered, as a journalist and as a woman of color, what could I do to help advance this conversation. People
were ____________________________________ to tell stories of injustices that they had faced, and I could feel their
pain. So I noticed we would get these emails, sometimes, from readers, saying, "Hey, why don't you have more
women and people of color in your obituaries?" And I thought, "Yeah, why don't we?" 

Since I was new to the team, I asked my colleagues, and they said, "Well, the people who are dying today are
from a generation
__________________________________________________________________________________________________. Perhaps in a
generation or two, we'll start to see more women and people of color in our obituaries." That answer just wasn't
satisfying at all. I wanted to know: Where are all the dead women? So I started thinking about how we hear
about people who have died, right? Number one way is through ________________________________________. And so I
thought, "Well, what if we were to look at international newspapers or scour social media?" It was around this
time when ... Everything was swirling in my mind, and I came across a website about Mary Outerbridge. She
___________________________________________ introducing tennis to America in 1874. And I thought, wow, one of the
biggest sports in America was introduced by a woman? Does anyone even know that? And did she get a New
York Times obituary? Spoiler alert -- she did not. 

So then I wondered who else we missed. And it sent me on this ____________________________________________  There

were some surprises. The pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells, who started the campaign against lynching. The
brilliant poet Sylvia Plath. Ada Lovelace, a mathematician now recognized as the first computer programmer. So I
went back to my team and I said, "What if we were to tell their stories now?" It took a while to get buy-in. There
was this concern that, you know, the newspaper might look bad because it didn't get it right the first time. It was
also a little weird to sort of look back at the past, rather than cover news stories of our day. But I said, "Guys, I
really think this is worthwhile." _________________________________________________________. And so, with the help of a
dozen writers and editors, we launched on March 8, 2018, with the stories of 15 remarkable women. 

And while I knew that the work my team was doing was powerful, I didn't expect the response to be equally
powerful. I had hundreds of emails. They were from people who
said, "________________________________________________________." They were from readers who said, "I cried on my way
to work, reading these stories, because I felt seen for the first time." And they were from colleagues of mine, who
said, "I never thought a woman of color would be allowed to achieve something like this at the New York
Times." I also got about 4,000 reader submissions suggesting who else we might have overlooked. (중략)

So, "Overlooked" has become wildly successful. It's becoming a TV show now, on Netflix. I cannot wait to see this
thing come to life. Something like 25 different publishers have reached out to me with interest in turning
"Overlooked" into a book. ______________________________________________________________________. It's also a reminder
of how newspapers document what's happening in our world every single day, and we have to make sure not to
leave out key people. That's why, even though it's been so meaningful to look back in the
past______________________________________________: "What about the future of obituaries -- how do I diversify
those?" That was my original problem, right? 

So to start answering this question, I wanted to gather some information. I went down to the sub-sub-basement
level of the New York Times Building, to the archives. We call it ‘the morgue.’ And I
________________________________________. He pointed me to a book called "New York Times Obituaries Index." So we
handed it to the New York Genealogical Society, and they digitized it for us.  And then a programmer wrote up a
program that scanned all those headlines for "Mr.," Mrs.," "Lady," "Sir," all the sort of gender-defining terms.  And
what we found was that from 1851 to 2017, only about 15 to 20 percent of our obits were on women. So next, I
worked with a programmer to build this tool, called the diversity analysis tool. It's a very dry name, but bear with
me, it's super helpful. _____________________________________________________. OK, if that doesn't sound like much to
you, this is how I used to calculate it before. So I asked this programmer to program in a goal, and that goal was
30 percent. From the year of Overlooked's launch, March of 2018, to March of 2019, I was hoping we could get to
30 percent of our obits on women. It was a number we hadn't achieved in 168 years, and I'm happy to say we
did it -- we got to 31 percent. 

It's awesome, but it's not enough. Next, we're hoping to get to 35 percent, and then 40 percent, until we
____________________________________. And then I'm hoping to partner with this programmer again, to build a similar
tool to measure people of color in our obits. That was something I wanted to do with "Overlooked" too, to
include men of color, and I finally got to do it with a special section for Black History Month, where we told the
stories of about a dozen black men and women. Again, it was a really powerful experience. Many of these people
had been slaves or were a generation removed from slavery. A lot of them had to make up stories about their
past just to get ahead in life. And there were these patterns of their struggles that came up again and again. 

Great things, like this obits project, do not come

easily. _______________________________________________________________________________________. There were moments
when I faced great self-doubt. I wondered if I was crazy or if I was all alone, and if I should just give up.  When
I've seen the reaction to this project, I know I'm not at all alone. There's so many people who feel the way I do. 

And so yeah, not many people think about obituaries. But when you do, you realize they're
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________. They're the last
chance to talk about somebody's contribution on the world. They were also an example of who society deemed
important. A hundred years from now, somebody could be looking into the past to see what our time was
like. I'm lucky, as a journalist, to have been able to have used this form of storytelling to help shift a narrative.  I
was also able to ____________________________________________________________. Little by little, I'm hoping I can keep
doing this work, and continue refocusing society's lens so that nobody else gets overlooked. Thank you.