For the past year, MISSING THEM, a memorial and journalism project with THE CITY and Columbia Journalism School has tracked down more than thousands of New Yorkers who died and written hundreds of obituaries, free of charge to families. The larger aim has been to close the gap in representation through a new hyper-local crowdsourcing and storytelling project focused on a handful of New York City neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19.
Reporting from this spring and summer has largely focused on children who have lost parents to COVID. These include reporting on the rate of children who have lost a parent to COVID in NYC (English / Spanish), reporting on new legislation that would require the Administration for Children’s Services to track the impacts of COVID, a support guide for those who have lost a loved one to COVID, and a profile of Ortner “Von” Murray.
In addition to this expansive reporting is the ever-growing collection of reports and obituaries of New Yorkers lost to COVID.
A full catalog of the MISSING THEM project can be found at thecity.nyc/missing-them.
MISSING THEM is a working collaboration with Columbia Journalism Investigations and Type Investigations and is supported in part by a Magic Grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.