N·1
1996–2006NYT Front Page
Every front-page story of the New York Times, coded with the CAP subtopic scheme — the dataset behind Boydstun's Making the News.
The Policy Agendas Project · media data
The New York Times data
The Times has been the Policy Agendas Project's flagship media source for decades — three official data series trace what made the news from 1946 on, and one of the corpora on which the project tested a hybrid human–machine classification workflow.
01
Three official data series
Distributed by the US Policy Agendas Project. Download at comparativeagendas.net ↗
N·2
1946–2016NYT Index
A systematic random sample of New York Times Index entries — the first entry on every odd-numbered page, across seven decades.
N·3
companionNYT Index Weights
Pages and articles-per-page estimates for the Index sample, so counts can be weighted to the full paper.
02
Inside the corpus
Real numbers from the collaboration's AI-classified New York Times research corpus — a snapshot of the archive taken on August 20, 2026, in which 99.8% of articles carry a CAP topic code. Search the corpus →
15.2M
articles
1851–2026
coverage span
99.8%
CAP-coded
29.2M
entity mentions
Articles by major policy topic
Top 12 CAP major topics across the full corpus · as of 2026-08-20
Articles per year, 1851–2025
Full-archive volume · peak 173K articles in a year · as of 2026-08-20
Share of coverage — top four topics, 1960–2025
Per-year share of all CAP-coded articles · as of 2026-08-20
Tone of coverage — negative vs positive, 1960–2025
Share of articles classified negative / positive (most coverage is neutral) · as of 2026-08-20
Most-mentioned people and organizations
NYSEYankeesUNTrumpRooseveltReaganNixonFordthe New York Stock ExchangeNBCCBSUnited NationsAMEXKochCarnegie HallWagnerDavisABCHitlerSmithLindsayEisenhowerJacksonCuomoBidenBaker
people · organizations
Named-entity recognition over article leads · 29.2M mentions tagged · as of 2026-08-20
03
The research built on it
From the front-page agenda to machine classification — the NYT corpus as a methods testbed.
2021
Quality & Quantity
Sebők, Miklós, Zoltán Kacsuk, and Ákos Máté — “The (real) need for a human touch: testing a human–machine hybrid topic-classification workflow on a New York Times corpus.” Built on the Boydstun front-page dataset — 28,548 lead paragraphs coded with the CAP major-topic schema — and the methodological bridge to this site's AI pipeline.
Google Scholar ↗2013
University of Chicago Press
Boydstun, Amber E. — Making the News: Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting. A decade of NYT front pages showing how few issues capture the lion's share of attention.
Google Scholar ↗Series descriptions: the US Policy Agendas Project datasets page ↗ (as of August 2026). No article text is reproduced on this site.