How The New York Times for Kids Explains the Capitol Attack

Grappling with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is hard enough for adults. How do you help children make sense of it? Two articles appearing this weekend in The New York Times for Kids, a section that runs the last Sunday of every month as part of the print newspaper, tackle that challenge. The editor of the section, Amber Williams, who wrote the main article, said it was one of the most difficult pieces she had written for the section. In a lightly edited conversation, she talked about the task.

I understand you sometimes plan these issues pretty far in advance. When did you decide that you needed to include an article on the Capitol riot?

We’re planning more than a month out for each issue. For this one, the lineup was put together before our holiday break in December. The articles were reported, the art was coming in, and some pages for the issue were already designed. Then Jan. 6 happened. At that point, we discussed adding a callout on one page that asked our readers for questions about what had happened, which we would answer in the February issue. At the time, things were just too chaotic. There were too many unknowns in the days directly after the riot, and too much was coming out that was changing how it was viewed.

But once impeachment proceedings against President Donald J. Trump began, we knew we had to rip up the page and figure out how to tell the story, even as things were still changing. I spent Martin Luther King’s Birthday, which was just a few days before the issue went to press, writing the article about the siege on the Capitol. Deb Bishop, our design director, led the art team in figuring out how to visually emphasize the article’s importance. And Alexa Díaz, our social media editor, used our new Instagram account to solicit questions about the impeachment from our followers that we adapted for print as well.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/insider/explaining-capitol-attack-kids.html