NewsLab’s Midwest News Index tracks local TV coverage

The Midwest News Index (MNI) has begun tracking the content of local television news in nine markets spanning five Midwestern states as part of a study that will be the most comprehensive examination ever conducted on the content of local broadcast news.

Although the project’s main focus will be on political news coverage, the MNI will capture and categorize all news stories.

The project, the first to examine broadcast news in a systematic fashion during an entire year, started this month and will last through May 31, 2007. The study will provide a benchmark to compare the volume and quality of coverage across the Midwest.

The project will capture all broadcasts aired during the 30 days before the 2006 elections and monitor a large random sample (one-third of broadcasts) of English and Spanish-language early and late-evening news coverage aired on local ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Telemundo and Univision in nine media markets.

The markets are each state’s capitol city and largest media market: Chicago, Springfield, Detroit, Lansing, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Cleveland, Columbus, Madison and Milwaukee.

The project, funded by the Joyce Foundation, will be carried out by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s NewsLab, in partnership with civic and media watchdog groups.

The MNI Index will:

• provide data with which to compare the quality of local news coverage across five Midwestern states;
• enhance the ability of local news stations to improve the quality of their work;
• serve as a learning tool;
• improve the accuracy of the information about local news coverage for policymakers and citizens; and
• generate advances in the quality of policy research surrounding this topic, as no study has ever systematically examined the content of news coverage in this way.

Most Americans get the majority of their news from local news broadcasts.

According to recent surveys, 79 percent of Americans receive their information from television and 59 percent report watching local news regularly, a substantially higher percentage than from any other news source.

Although more Americans acquire their information from local TV newscasts, there have been few systematic studies on the content and effect of local television news.

The study will generate quarterly reports on the project’s most recent findings. Information and findings will also be continually updated on the project Web site at http://www.mni.wisc.edu. The study will also produce a comprehensive Web-based searchable archive, available to scholars.

NewsLab, directed by political science professor Ken Goldstein, is a 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.

With more than a terabyte of storage, 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 University of Wisconsin–Madison Advertising Project is also housed in the NewsLab facility.