About the News Coverage Index

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index is, we believe, the largest effort ever to measure and analyze the American news media on a continuing basis.

The Index examines more than four dozen news outlets in real time to determine what is being covered and what is not—a broad sense of the American news agenda. The findings are then released in a weekly report that features an Index of the top stories, a narrative analyzing the twists, turns, and trajectory of the coverage, and a breakdown of the differences among media sectors.

The initiative is an attempt to provide an empirical basis for cataloguing and understanding what a wide swath of media offer the American public at a time of growing debate about the press’ influence, standards and economic foundation.

The outlets studied come from the five main sectors of mainstream media—print, network TV, cable, online, and radio. They include evening and morning network news, several hours of daytime and prime time cable news each day, newspapers from around the country, the top online news sites, and radio, including headlines, long form programs and talk. In all, the Index sample includes a weekly average of 900 stories from 52 outlets (27 to 30 each week-day with some rotation), every Monday through Sunday.

The unprecedented scope and size of the media universe captured and coded also serves as a foundation for a number of more detailed studies PEJ produces.

The News Coverage Index was designed by PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel and Deputy Director Amy Mitchell and an advisory team of nine academic and commercial researchers over the course of two years. It required the creation of proprietary software and a new website.

The index report is written by PEJ Associate Director Mark Jurkowitz, former press critic of the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix. The coding team, which will work 24 hours behind the news cycle, includes sixteen professional coders. They work with a senior researcher, Paul Hitlin, and a supervising research methodologist, Hong Ji.

The News Coverage Index is also paired with an expanded News Interest Index by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which is led by Andrew Kohut. The Center analyzes the public’s response to the stories identified in the News Coverage Index.

These twin indices of what the media are covering, and how the public is responding will offer an unprecedented pair of tools to understand the degree to which journalists and citizens are in sync—or in disagreement—over what constitutes important news.

Release of our Data Set

PEJ makes the data set from the Index available publicly as continuously and quickly as is practical. Our plan is to make the data set available in a yearly basis. The 2007 data set was released in July 2008, the 2008 data set was released in July 2009, the 2009 data was released in July 2010, and data from 2010 was released in July 2011.

Updated July 8, 2011