The New York Times Has Reached Peak Cat
The New York Times has written about a ton of cats over the past 140 years.
That finding is the subject of a new academic paper published in the journal Journalism that chronicles all the different ways cats have popped up in the newspaper: as "commodities, heroes, villains, victims, women's best friends and urban symbols."
The paper's author, University of Illinois journalism professor Matthew Ehrlich, pored through The Times' digital archive to find a wealth of 2,300 stories on cats, starting in the 1870s (the paper was founded in 1851). As tabloids began to compete with The Times in the 1920s, feline faces appeared more often in black and white. In the 1970s, stories began to focus more on animals rights issues, like declawing and spay and neuter programs. Some pieces started to shed light on cats victimized by abuse or experimentation.
Now, the paper has reached peak cat: it averages about one cat story per week. There's even a tag page filled with only cat stories (one headline reads: "Lessons From a Master Cat Photographer").
"What it suggests, obviously, is that cultural attitudes toward cats have changed dramatically," Ehrlich said in a release. "[Those stories] are rooted in history, and they point to intensely political debates over how animals should be treated and what journalism should be."
The paper also notes that there is a lot more to the media's relationship with cats than "clickbait" - and many people love reading more serious cat stories.
"It's not that animal news is something that is an exemplar for what all of journalism should be," Erlich said. "It's just that we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as trivial, when so many people care so deeply about it."