OC. I used New York Times API/archive data to build an explorer of the paper’s coverage over the last 25+ years: 1.5 billion words across 2.2 million articles by about 26,000 reporters.
You can use it to look at:
- which reporters covered which beats
- who shared bylines with whom
- article frequency and length
- headline-word frequency over time
- section comparisons
- U.S. and global coverage patterns
A few things that jump out at me:
- to the surprise of no one, Maggie Haberman dominates recent byline counts
- Trump dominates headlines compared to other recent presidents, even when OOO
- Iowa surges every four years
- China coverage peaked around 2014
- India looks relatively under-covered on a per-capita basis
I began this in Python a couple of years ago during the Lede Program at Columbia J School but revived it recently with Claude Code for a lot of the grunt work. Any errors are mine.
Let me know what you think! Explorer: https://tedalcorn.github.io/nyt/
Posted by theodore_a
3 Comments
I find it depressing how much more coverage Trump gets than other presidents. He even got more coverage during the second half of Biden’s presidency than the actual president. His attention seeking behavior is very effective at driving coverage.
https://preview.redd.it/yhfv8l8ej0vg1.png?width=479&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b65d1c093d906a0b8f20dc79abd318b21906b3a
How can they state that they don’t have an obsession with israel and that they don’t ignore much larger conflicts?
From what Reddit taught me, NYT mentioning Trump’s name this often means that Trump and the NYT are close friends.