Midwest News Index (MNI) Methodology
This report is released by the Wisconsin NewsLab of the Department
of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The principal
investigators are Ken Goldstein, professor of Political Science at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Wisconsin
NewsLab and Wisconsin Advertising Project and Erika Franklin Fowler,
Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and Research Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab. The project is funded
by a grant from The Joyce Foundation. In the eight weeks leading up
to the 2006 election campaign (September 7th through November 6th),
project staff captured local news on the ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates
in 9 Midwest markets in five states (the capital city and the largest
media market in the state): Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul), Wisconsin
(Madison and Milwaukee), Illinois (Chicago and Champaign/Springfield),
Michigan (Detroit and Lansing), and Ohio (Cleveland and Columbus).
This 9-market study of local news coverage of politics is part of
a longer project that will examine the content of local news throughout
the year, the most in-depth research on individual markets ever conducted
(www.mni.wisc.edu).
The news programming was captured through a sophisticated market-based
media server technology. Each day, digitally-recorded video was sent
over the Internet to the UW NewsLab servers overnight. The NewsLab
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (www.polisci.wisc.edu/uwnewslab)
is a unique state-of-the art facility that has the infrastructure,
technical skill, and supervisory capability to capture, clip, code,
analyze and archive any media in any market – domestic or international
– in real time. Video can be gathered, digitized, sorted and
archived automatically by the InfoSite system, a media analysis product
of CommIT Technology Solutions of Madison, Wisconsin (www.commitonline.com).
This system includes a variety of automatic validation checks to ensure
superior coding reliability and logical consistency. With over a terabyte
of storage, the UW NewsLab servers manage data, encode and archive
video, and serve content through one of many custom media analysis
tools, both internally, and to the rest of the world via the Internet.
The Midwest News Index director is Tricia Olsen. The University of
Wisconsin Advertising Project (www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising)
is also housed in the UW NewsLab facility, where it tracks real time
political advertising flows across the nation.
Research Design
In the 60 days preceding Election Day, UW NewsLab will examine up
to an hour a day from each of the four major stations in all 9 Midwest
media markets covering 10 percent of the nation’s population.
Over the rest of the year UW NewsLab will randomly sample 8,760 broadcasts
(33 percent) from a sampling frame of up to an hour a day from each
station (two half-hour or one hour long broadcast) aired over the
course of the year. Throughout the entire study, the Wisconsin NewsLab
will also analyze national news.
Capture
The process of capturing local news data begins by placing servers
in each media market. We placed servers in 9 markets (Chicago, Cleveland,
Columbus, Detroit, Lansing, Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Springfield),
which capture up to an hour of news programming: generally the 5pm
and 10pm broadcasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC for markets in Central
Time, the 6pm and 11pm broadcasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC for markets
in Eastern Time, and up to an hour of Fox at 9pm in CST and 10pm in
EST. Once the video is electronically captured, all segments are sent
over the internet to the University of Wisconsin NewsLab servers.
For the 2006 study, the system is capturing over 250 hours of local
news content each week.
The sample is not a sample of all local television news broadcasts
in the Midwest and therefore does not allow this study to speak to
the content of all Midwest local news programming. It is, however,
a sample of the some of the highest-rated programming from the capitol
city and largest media market in five Midwestern states, allowing
us to make generalizable comparisons among and between states in the
sample.
The NewsLab system captured on average 96 percent of targeted broadcasts,
a notably high rate. In 8 out of 9 markets, the average station capture
rate equaled or exceeded 95 percent. A full listing of each individual
station capture rate can be found in the appendix.
There is no reason to suspect that there are systematic differences
between the overall findings about regularly scheduled news broadcasts
reported here and the missing data. Even so, the findings in this
report are based only on the broadcasts and campaign news stories
actually watched and analyzed by project staff. The majority of the
report contains overall percentages and averages which, given the
high capture rate, are unlikely to be significantly affected by missing
data. Broadcasts analyzed in this report aired from September 7 through
October 6, 2006. Television news broadcasts are often pre-empted or
replaced by late-running sporting events, particularly on weekends.
As a result, the number of broadcasts for each station is based on
broadcasts where the regular news programs actually aired, not on
the number of broadcasts a station would have aired without being
pre-empted or replaced.
Clipping, Coding, and Archiving
In the initial step of the analysis, all news segments are clipped
into individual stories and categorized by story topic. Trained
“clippers” use the system to mark the beginning and
end of each story, code it by primary and secondary foci and then
automatically send each story to a “coding” queue, where
it is assigned to a trained, student coder. At this juncture, all
election-related news stories are coded on a variety of information
including story length, office focus (gubernatorial, senatorial,
etc), candidates covered, tone of story (positive, negative, balanced
and value neutral) and length of candidate sound bites. Once stories
have been captured, clipped and coded, they are sent automatically
to a web-based searchable archive. All 2006 election related stories
are available for users to search the video database on a host of
items including: keywords, story subject, station, market, date
aired, tone of coverage as well as other project-specific items
(such as candidates mentioned for elections, etc) to name a few.
UW NewsLab also uses inter-coder reliability (ICR) statistics. This
process assures that our coders, independent of one another, are
coding in a similar fashion.
Reliability Mechanisms
Multiple checks are employed to guarantee data reliability. These
checks ensure a dataset in which all variables are complete and
consistent: 1) the system requires data to pass automatic logic
checks before submitting stories into the coding system; 2) a series
of filters are used to flag data that contains seemingly contradictory
answers for supervisor review; and 3) inter-coder reliability (ICR)
is constantly monitored to ensure the consistency and reliability
of the data. Through the comparison of these two answer sets, we
are able to track the consistency and accuracy of our data. UW NewsLab
Staff
Kenneth Goldstein – Principal Investigator
Ken Goldstein is a professor of political science at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the University of Wisconsin
Advertising Project (www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising) and the
University of Wisconsin NewsLab. Goldstein received his Ph.D. from
the University of Michigan in 1996 with a focus on American politics
and research methodology. He is the author of Interest Groups, Lobbying,
and Participation in America, published by Cambridge University
Press, and recently completed a book on the impact of television
advertising. He is also at work on a book under contract with Princeton
University Press on the targeting of campaign activity and television
advertising in the 2004 campaign. In addition, his research on political
communication and local news, news coverage of health issues and
unintentional injuries, voter turnout, survey methodology, Israeli
politics, and presidential elections has appeared in over 25 refereed
journal articles and book chapters.
Goldstein’s reputation for unbiased and non-partisan analysis
has made him a favorite source for politicians and the news media
alike. He has appeared numerous times on Newshour with Jim Lehrer,
Nightline, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening
News, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN, and is a frequent contributor
on National Public Radio. He is also quoted extensively in the country’s
top newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and The Wall Street Journal. His expert testimony was also used
in the litigation and Supreme Court decision on BCRA.
Erika Franklin Fowler – Principal Investigator
Erika Franklin Fowler is a Ph.D. candidate in political science
at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the Research
Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab. She is completing a dissertation
about the political content and effectiveness of local television
news coverage of elections in which she concludes that political
advertisements actually have more substantive information and a
more consistent effect on citizen knowledge, perceptions of the
campaign and turnout than local television news messages. Fowler
has also published several pieces on political communication and
free media in particular, including a book chapter on effects of
free media in campaigns with Ken Goldstein, an article with Ken
Goldstein, Marty Kaplan and Matthew Hale to appear in an upcoming
volume of Stanford Law & Policy Review and an analysis of health
news on local television (with Ken Goldstein and medical researchers
at the University of Michigan) published in the American Journal
of Managed Care.
A summa cum laude graduate of St. Olaf College with a B.A. in political
science and mathematics, Fowler has worked with the Wisconsin NewsLab
since its inception in 2002.
Tricia Olsen – MNI Project Director
A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Tricia
Olsen has worked with the Wisconsin NewsLab since the fall of 2004.
She is the Project Director for UW NewsLab and will run the Midwest
News Index, the first and most systematic project to track a full
year of news coverage in nine Midwestern markets. Olsen is also
responsible for overseeing Spanish-language coding and writing and
administering foundation grants for UW NewsLab. Olsen graduated
from Carleton College with a B.A. in Latin American Studies and
a minor in Political Science, where she refined her Spanish and
Portuguese language skills. She earned her M.A. in Political Science
from UW - Madison in 2006. Her research interests include Latin
American politics, methodology, and transnational social movements
and networks.
APPENDIX
INDIVIDUAL STATION CAPTURE RATES
(October 7 November 6, 2006)
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