York Times Research Articles

Insta-News: How the New York Times and Washington Post Use Instagram

ABSTRACT As social media platforms increasingly gain institutional power within the media landscape, it is important to understand how news organizations are working within the platforms’ restrictions. The New York Times and Washington Post are two legacy publishers known worldwide for their high-quality print and digital content. As two highly followed accounts on Instagram, they make strong rationale for leading the way in how to use Instagram for other journalism outlets. As such, the following study quantitatively analyzes the content that each organization shared on their official Instagram accounts so that researchers and practitioners can better understand two examples of how to utilize the platform. Additionally, user responses to the content are discussed as they are essential in knowing what types of content should be highlighted. Findings demonstrate similarities and differences in approach in terms of topic, content type, visual approach, and more. In particular, each organization highlighted topics that were in line with their overall brands, with the Times focusing more soft news content and the Post highlighting politics and breaking news. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed in terms of algorithmic gatekeeping that integrates platform restrictions, user responses, and content types. Future avenues of research are outlined.

Generative AI and Fair Use: Comment upon New York Times v. OpenAI Based on Search Engine Precedents

Generative AI and Fair Use: Comment upon New York Times v. OpenAI Based on Search Engine Precedents

Sporting Revolutions: The 1970s and the Making of Modern College Athletics

At the beginning of the 1970s, college sports were on turbulent ground. “Colleges prepare for the impact of rising costs and more campus unrest,” warned the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was a bit blunter in its prognosis, reporting that “like housewives everywhere, athletic directors of the nation's colleges [were] having budget trouble.” National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Executive Director, Walter Byers, warned of “cadres of disgruntled athletes,” demanding rights, money, and control. Byers was also troubled by Title IX, the new educational amendment mandating gender equity in federally funded schools, including in athletic departments. “The possible doom of our collegiate sports is near,” Byers proclaimed. “There is not an athletic department in the country where officials are optimistic,” University of Michigan's Athletic Director (AD), Don Canham, lamented. Norv Richey, University of Oregon's AD concurred, declaring, “The future of intercollegiate athletics are in peril.”

Welcome to SportsWorld: An Introduction to the 1970s

In 1975, New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte published SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, a critical examination of how the values of American sports had become corrupted and distorted by power brokers who pulled the purse strings. “SportsWorld” was an infrastructure first built in the late nineteenth century by industrialists, educators, politicians, promoters, journalists, and military leaders who believed in the potency of sports and American exceptionalism. For the faithful, SportsWorld represented a positive cultural force that unified the nation, strengthened vigorous manhood, and advanced the country's democratic ideals of equal opportunity and fair play. “In sports,” Lipsyte reflected, Americans believed “children will learn courage and self-control, old people will find blissful nostalgia, and families will discover new ways to communicate among themselves. Immigrants will find shortcuts to recognition as Americans. Rich and poor, black and white, educated and unskilled, we will all find a unifying language. The melting pot may be a myth, but we will all come together in the ballpark.”

25th Jan Revolution in the Articles of New York Times: A Study in Critical Discourse Analysis

Journalists have covered the 25th January Egyptian revolution analyzing and expressing opinions. The thesis is concerned with the inconsistency of their stances and positions. More specifically, it investigates shifts in the political stances of American journalists during and post the January 25th Egyptian Revolution. The thesis adopts Fairclough’s (1992, 2010) three-dimension framework of discourse, together with, Fairclough & Fairclough’s (2012) argumentation model to investigate the corpus of the current work. The corpus incorporates ten articles, seven editorials and three op-ed articles, that are published in the American newspaper New York Times on the Egyptian revolution from January 25th, 2011 to March 31st, 2011. Analysis is conducted on three levels; textual, discursive and social. Results indicate that writers are bias, taking sides and changing them according to the changes of the events. Thus, the articles witness a gradual change of stance from the pro-Mubarak and anti-revolution stances to the anti-Mubarak and pro-revolution stances.

Reporting on Antibiotic Resistance in Two US Newspapers Before and During Covid-19

Antibiotic resistance (AR) is a growing health crisis that has remained underrepresented in coverage across major news publications in the U.S. despite increasing rates of related disease outbreaks and mortality worldwide. This study used content analysis to examine the coverage of AR in two major U.S. news publications before the COVID-19 pandemic (2018-2019) and during it (2020-2021). Coverage of AR in The New York Times (NYT) and The Washington Post (WP) was analyzed according to the use of frames, the quantity of articles published, and a number of other variables including stakeholders, diseases, and terms referring to AR. These factors were used to assess how coverage of AR differed before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it differed between the two newspapers. Pre-COVID-19 coverage focused on AR as an isolated pandemic, while coverage during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic often used AR as a supplementary component of the coverage to the main topic of COVID-19. This study found that both before and during the outbreak of COVID-19, the majority of the observed articles did not fully explain the scope, severity, or solution for the AR crisis. Instead, they provided readers with baseline information, framing AR as a contemporary issue and generally encouraging action but included very few tangible suggestions for every day, individual action for readers. KEYWORDS: Superbugs; Frames; Antibiotic Resistance; Coronavirus; COVID-19; Media Coverage; Health Crises; Medicine

News media in crisis: a sentiment and emotion analysis of US news articles on unemployment in the COVID-19 pandemic

News media play an indispensable role in disseminating information and shaping public perception during times of crisis. This study, integrating sentiment, emotion, discourse, and timeline analyses together, conducts a corpus-based sentiment analysis of the news articles on unemployment from the New York Times in 2020 to capture the emotional dynamics conveyed by the newspaper as the pandemic-induced unemployment developed in the US. The results reveal that positive sentiment in the news articles on unemployment is significantly higher than negative sentiment. In emotion analysis, “trust” and “anticipation” rank the first and second among the eight emotions, while “fear” and “sadness” top the negative emotions. Complemented with a discourse analysis approach, the study reveals that the change of the sentiments and emotions over time is linked with the evolution of the pandemic and unemployment, the policy response as well as the protests against ethnic inequalities. This study highlights the important role mainstream news media play in information dissemination and solution-focused reportage at the time of severe crisis.

Topicality boosts popularity: a comparative analysis of NYT articles and Reddit memes

This study sheds light on interconnected topic dynamics across traditional news sources and social media platforms, emphasizing the influential role of topicality in shaping content popularity in social media. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation and BERTopic models, we define sets of 120 New York Times (NYT) topics to compare with 899,766 image-with-text memes from Reddit, showing that social media content aligns with many of the same topical patterns observed in news outlets. Topicality is formalized based on the temporal distributions of topics over the past 5 years. Using these topicality features, the investigation reveals significant correlations between the rising popularity of NYT topics and increased average upvotes on Reddit, particularly evident in “innovator” memes posted during the early stages of a topic’s prevalence in the NYT. Furthermore, topicality features show significant predictive power over other content-based control features in a CatBoost classifier prediction of viral Reddit memes.

Natural language processing and financial markets: semi-supervised modelling of coronavirus and economic news

AbstractThis paper investigates the reactions of US financial markets to press news from January 2019 to 1 May 2020. To this end, we deduce the content and uncertainty of the news by developing apposite indices from the headlines and snippets of The New York Times, using unsupervised machine learning techniques. In particular, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to infer the content (topics) of the articles, and Word Embedding (implemented with the Skip-gram model) and K-Means to measure their uncertainty. In this way, we arrive at the definition of a set of daily topic-specific uncertainty indices. These indices are then used to find explanations for the behavior of the US financial markets by implementing a batch of EGARCH models. In substance, we find that two topic-specific uncertainty indices, one related to COVID-19 news and the other to trade war news, explain the bulk of the movements in the financial markets from the beginning of 2019 to end-April 2020. Moreover, we find that the topic-specific uncertainty index related to the economy and the Federal Reserve is positively related to the financial markets, meaning that our index is able to capture the actions of the Federal Reserve during periods of uncertainty.

Hallidayean Transitivity Analysis: ChatGPT in the Contrasting Headlines of Two National Newspapers

Conflicting national media positions are often reflected in the discursive patterns used in news headlines. By using the headlines collected from online articles in the Chinese national daily newspaper China Daily and the American national daily newspaper The New York Times, Halliday’s transitivity analysis is deployed to analyze these processes in the light of critical discourse studies. The study finds that while China Daily holds a moderate attitude toward ChatGPT, The New York Times tends to view this new technology critically. The results also highlight the cultural values and ideologies of the two newspapers from the choices of their news headlines.

A Cosmopolitan Revelation: Travel as a Religious Act with Rick Steves’ Europe

For nearly fifty years, travel writer Rick Steves has been guiding Americans through Europe. Nicknamed a “travel guru” by The New York Times, Steves preaches a prescriptive, redemptive vision of travel: by packing light, pursuing historically-rich experiences, and seeking to become a “temporary local” and extrovert in search the “real Europe,” Americans can be cured of their ethnocentricity and experience a cosmopolitan revelation. It is through this sense of moral purpose that traveling the “Rick Steves way” becomes more than a tourism: it is religion. This article explores how Rick Steves’ vision for travel is performed into being discursively and aesthetically, thereby constructing a particular material configuration of Europe imbued with iconic power.

Framing the Yanomami: decolonial analysis of U.S coverage of Indigenous people in Brazil during COVID-19

ABSTRACT Mainstream news coverage in the U.S. of Indigenous people and the issues that threaten their survival has largely validated misconceptions rooted in colonial views and discourses dependent on harmful stereotypes. This study employs a qualitative thematic analysis of 32 articles from the New York Times and the Associated Press using a decolonial lens to investigate how U.S. news outlets framed the Yanomami people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings focus on four main frames that we identified among the news stories: (1) victimization and vulnerability, (2) illegal mining and policing, (3) environmental impact, and (4) Indigenous sovereignty. We discuss how these frames reinforce the colonial gaze, which continue to shape public knowledge, attitudes, and policymaking about Indigenous people globally, and how these findings contribute to theorizing about the role of media in Indigenous political representation.

PoLYTC: a novel BERT-based classifier to detect political leaning of YouTube videos based on their titles

Over two-thirds of the U.S. population uses YouTube, and a quarter of U.S. adults regularly receive their news from it. Despite the massive political content available on the platform, to date, no classifier has been proposed to classify the political leaning of YouTube videos. The only exception is a classifier that requires extensive information about each video (rather than just the title) and classifies the videos into just three classes (rather than the widely-used categorization into six classes). To fill this gap, “PoLYTC” (Political Leaning YouTube Classifier) is proposed to classify YouTube videos based on their titles into six political classes. PoLYTC utilizes a large language model, namely BERT, and is fine-tuned on a public dataset of 11.5 million YouTube videos. Experiments reveal that the proposed solution achieves high accuracy (75%) and high F1-score (77%), thereby outperforming the state of the art. To further validate the solution’s classification performance, several videos were collected from numerous prominent news agencies’ YouTube channels, such as Fox News and The New York Times, which have widely known political leanings. These videos were classified based on their titles, and the results have shown that, in the vast majority of cases, the predicted political leaning matches that of the news agency. PoLYTC can help YouTube users make informed decisions about which videos to watch and can help researchers analyze the political content on YouTube.

Truth, racial healing, and transforming systems of racism.

This article stemmed from an acceptance speech for the Global Alliances' 2022 Presidential Award made by Dr. Gail Christopher and her daughter, Heather McGhee. Heather McGhee is a New York Times best-selling author of the book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. The history, transformative impact, and importance of the truth, racial healing, and transformation movement in exposing and eradicating the fallacy of a hierarchy of human value are outlined. Dr. Christopher shares insights into the past and provides hope for the future through her Rx Racial Healing model for authentic storytelling and changes in perspective. The article also discusses the momentum of public health jurisdictions declaring racism as a public health crisis and presents a resource, Healing Through Policy: Creating Pathways to Racial Justice, that has been developed to assist jurisdictions in related work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Critérios para a delimitação da proteção jurídica da imagem dos agentes políticos/servidores públicos em face da liberdade de expressão/imprensa: Reflexão à luz do caso New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)

Through exploratory qualitative research, monographic procedure, inductive approach, the general objective is to analyze the ratio decidendi in the preceding New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 US 254 (1964), with the aim of solving the problem about which criteria should be used in solving the real antinomy between the personality rights of a political agent or public servant on the one hand and freedom of expression / press on the other. With a focus on this research problem, it was assumed that due to the constitutional similarity between the compared systems, it would be possible to apply, in Brazilian law, the legal rules adopted by the American Supreme Court. As a result, based on the sources adopted, the hypothesis initially adopted can be confirmed, as it was found that the criteria used by the American Supreme Court in this paradigmatic precedent are compatible with the Brazilian constitutional system and offer an adequate criterion for the solution of this antinomy, since at the same time they guarantee the right to participation democracy through access to information as a rule, establish exceptions through the doctrine of the actual malice that is shown to balance the interests at stake, preventing the dissemination of information known to be false, or whose verification of veracity has been neglected by the journalist / broadcaster; as well as that defamatory information that relates to the strictly personal / intimate sphere of the public person’s life, since these cannot be considered covered by the “public interest”.

US media coverage of housing and the Great Recession: Do inequality and race matter?

Housing is an issue that affects all individuals in society. People have first-hand experiences with housing, or the lack thereof, daily. Housing is also a macro-issue that is affected by and has implications for the nation’s economy and public policy. Despite the centrality of housing for individuals and society, few scholars have examined media coverage of the issue. We examine media framing of housing in the New York Times between 2005 and 2010, a period that encompasses the 2008 Great Recession. We investigate whether the New York Times framed housing episodically by focusing on individuals or thematically by focusing on societal factors. We compare framing of housing topics related to inequality – such as homelessness, affordable housing, foreclosure and public housing – to more general housing topics – such as mortgages, homeownership and economic policy. We also examine if frames differ depending on whether the coverage mentions racial minorities. We find that the New York Times framed housing primarily as a thematic issue during this period; however, for stories focused specifically on inequality and racial minorities, there was substantially more episodic coverage. This research provides the much-needed insight into news coverage of inequality and race in the context of housing and housing policy.

Growing deviations between elite and non-elite media coverage of climate change in the United States

Empirical research aimed at understanding public awareness and opinion on climate change has focused heavily on media coverage. Nearly all prior media studies focus on the United States and on a small number of elite news sources, notably the national newspapers of record. To widen the aperture, we take advantage of a database (MediaCloud) that covers a much larger array of print and word media: 168 million articles about all subjects, derived from 9000 unique U.S. news sources. Coverage of climate change from the “heartland” sources—dominated by state and local news outlets far from the headquarters of national newspapers of record—has risen 144% from 2011 until 2022. Elite news coverage, however, has risen at twice that pace (299%). Over time, the propensity to cover climate change has diverged. In 2011 there were 104 days when the heartland news sources had more coverage of climate change than elite news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. By 2022 there were only 11 such days. That year, elite news outlets produced roughly three times the coverage of climate change as heartland news outlets. We also find some differences in the topics covered by these two categories of news sources. Such disparities in the intensity of attention to climate change, along with apparently more subtle variations in topical coverage, are variations that deserve future explanation. They are also a reminder that analysis of climate coverage should choose data sources with care since the narrative around what the public is learning about climate appears to vary substantially between heartland and elite new sources.

A mother's call to arms.

Due to the rapid proliferation of vape stores and their ubiquity across the country, many consumers assume that their products are safe, well-studied, and accurately labeled. However, there is rapidly emerging evidence that Delta 8, sold as an alternative to high concentrate tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) marijuana (still illegal in most states) is associated with severe depression, psychosis, and even suicide, particularly in vulnerable adolescent and young adult populations. This trend is well-known to emergency room physicians and psychiatry, and the number of online family advocacy groups is increasing. Delta 8 effects have recently been featured in popular media by the New York Times, Discover, USA Today, and more. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reported an increase in complaints and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released an advisory warning in 2023 about cannabidiol which included Delta 8. For those already affected and their families, however, any regulation will come too late as they face an uncertain future and much anxiety about whether the psychosis will abate or prove permanent. This 55-word story illustrates one mother's rage at the devastation Delta 8 has caused her family. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

National Image Shaping by Chinese and Foreign Media in Reporting the Lockdown in Wuhan: A Case Study of China Daily and The New York Times

National Image Shaping by Chinese and Foreign Media in Reporting the Lockdown in Wuhan: A Case Study of China Daily and The New York Times

Interactional Voices from Newspaper Editorials: A Filipino-American Contrastive Study

Using categorization of interactive metadiscourse, the present study attempted to contrastively compare editorials of two writing cultures, Filipinos and Americans. The objectives of the study were identifying the cultural features revealed by the Filipino editorialists and Anglo-American editorialists, and determining how the two writing cultures differ in the utilization of interactional metadiscourse resources in their editorials. A total of 180 editorials served as the corpus of the study; 90 from the Philippine Daily Inquirers (PDY) and 90 from the New York Times (NYT). The findings revealed that American editorialists significantly employed metadiscource resources as compared to Filipino editorialists specifically the employment of code glosses and transitional devices. This can be attributed to their writing confidence in utilizing their native language for Americans, while second language for Filipinos. Cultural, political, and social realities also play a critical role in the utilization of metadiscoursal resources in writing.The pedagogical implications were provided for future research directions.