Comparing the Topics of Front-Page and Full-Paper Stories in the New York Times

Many scholars rely on studies of media coverage of public policy issues in order to study salience. The Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org) makes available a sample of New York Times stories going back to 1947, based on the published Index to the Times, but this index may soon be discontinued. Boydstun has created a comprehensive database of all stories appearing on the front page of the Times going back to 1998, with plans to extend this dataset back much further. We assess the differences in the two databases. Front-page coverage differs from full-paper coverage in obvious ways, and many elements that regularly appear inside the paper may rarely or never appear on page A-1. Front-page coverage is also more skewed and has a greater orientation toward repeating the topics on which attention focused yesterday (that is, it has higher “friction”), compared to full-paper coverage. Our findings have implications for those interested in constructing media databases and provide further understandings of the nature and characteristics of news coverage of public policy issues. Boydstun has already demonstrated the feasibility of constructing a full database of front-page stories over time. Sampling from a database of all full-paper stories is difficult for technical reasons, however. Automated classification systems may potentially allow for the creation of a full-paper database, but in the meantime is it important to know the differences in topic coverage and other characteristics of the front page versus the entire content of media sources. Scholars should be aware of the differences across approaches to this question and choose their indicators carefully