The New York Times has published a question and answer style interview with Charanna Alexander, who in May 2021 was named "weddings editor" at the newspaper:
Do you have any other goals for the section?
...we're looking to tell stories of commitments that are not necessarily associated with marriage. What we've been seeing is that a lot of people are not getting married and are not committing in that traditional sense. But they are starting families, and they are creating homes together in a different way. We want to explore that: What does it mean to be committed in 2022? We will begin to tell stories outside of our traditional Mini-Vows that explore relationships outside of what we know to be marriage. Marriage has been our bread and butter because, obviously, we're the Weddings section, but I do feel that it is time that we get into what is considered nontraditional and kind of normalize that. For example, we have written about platonic spouses, or people who are marrying their friends. ...That's where we're looking to go, to just expand what the word commitment means.
Nice to see the transparency about goals. It seems like a delicate balance between covering the reality of what people are doing (a traditional goal of news) and an agenda ("normalize," "expand") that involves taking a side in an unsettled values or policy debate. Newspapers do the second all the time but they often aren't quite so transparent about it.
Survey data bears out the idea that marriage and even couplehood are on the decline. A 2021 Pew analysis found: "As relationships, living arrangements and family life continue to evolve for American adults, a rising share are not living with a romantic partner. A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data finds that in 2019, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered – that is, neither married nor living with a partner. This share is up sharply from 29% in 1990."