Comparing Front and Inside Page Newspaper Coverage in Public Policy Debates.

Many scholars rely on studies of media coverage of public policy issues in order to study public or media attention and salience. The Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org) makes available a dataset based on 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. We propose here a comprehensive assessment of the reliability of different approaches to the creation of media databases for the study of public policy. Our analysis will focus on policy agendas topics to compare the frequency of appearance of stories in the Times based on page-one status, relevance to public policy, and domestic versus international politics. We will also explore the feasibility of creating a longer time series based on the full text databases that have recently become available. A complete database based only on front page stories, however, may be feasible to collect. While we have a practical focus in this paper, our research is related to other studies on the topic of the reliability or unique nature of media outlets, and we expect the paper to be of interest to scholars interested in public policy, mass communications, and agenda-setting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]