The Walsh News Index is a reference source that measures the coverage of prominent news stories.
We quantify the exposure of selected news stories on a monthly basis in order to put the media landscape into context. In baseball, the difference between batting averages of 180, 300 and 600 is understood: the context is well known.
This Index’s purpose is to do the same for news coverage. 500 hits has proven to be a significant score within The Walsh News Index. Since January 2016, a news story with 500 hits, has always placed a news story in the top 20% .
Reporters, editors and pundits, using our charts and indexes, can now show which news stories are gaining and which are losing news coverage.
Method:
Clusters of keywords (Boolean search strings) representing selected news stories are sifted through the headlines and lead paragraphs of the Top 51 daily newspapers. The combined daily circulation of these newspapers is over 13 million. Each “hit” is then tabulated in a spreadsheet revealing trends in news reporting.
“In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position.” … in news media.
Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 2, 1 January 1972, Pages 176–187
“The news of the day… is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.”
Walter Lippman, 1920 Liberty and the News,’What Modern Liberty Means’.