Search engine giant Google is celebrating veteran American journalist Nellie Bly’s 151st birthday with a musical doodle. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, popularly known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was a pioneer in the field of investigative journalism.
She began her career with The Pittsburgh Dispatch. Angered by a “regressive” editorial on women in the newspaper, she wrote a rebuttal piece. Impressed by it, the editor gave her a job in the newspaper.
She wrote ‘Around The World In Seventy-Two Days’, based on an expedition she took that covered many countries including: England, France, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.
She was also America’s first female war correspondent. She covered the World War I from Austria. Nellie Bly passed away due to pneumonia on 27 January, 1922.
“When creating the Doodle, we took inspiration from Karen O’s lyrics and Nellie’s journey around the globe,” said Liat Ben-Rafael, Program Manager, Google Doodles, through a blogpost.
“Oh, Nellie, take us all around the world and break those rules ’cause you’re our girl,” the song goes. It’s the first original song to be written for the amazing illustrations that appear on Google’s homepage.
This is also the first doodle to feature stop-motion animation. The musical animation pays homage to Bly’s extraordinary life as a pioneering journalist and adventurer in an era when little more was expected of women than child rearing and housekeeping. All those moments figure in the doodle, which took Wu about two months to create in a sort of labor of love.