The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released their 2010 News Coverage Index raw data. Their findings can be used by scholars for their research by visiting the PEJ website: http://www.journalism.org/by_the_numbers/datasets.

A press release from PEJ says:

The News Coverage Index (NCI)—The NCI captures and analyzes some 50 news outlets in real time to determine what is being covered and what is not in the U.S. news media. The NCI launched in January 2007 and has run continuously since. Weekly findings are released every Tuesday in a concise narrative that charts the top stories of the week, trajectory of the coverage and differences among media sectors. In all, the 2010 NCI sample includes 52 outlets, every Monday through Sunday. The key variables include source, story date, big story, broad story topic, placement, format, geographic focus, story word count, duration of broadcast story and lead newsmaker. The outlets studied come from print, network TV, cable, online, and radio. They include evening and morning network news, several hours of daytime and prime time cable news each day, newspapers from around the country, the top online news sites, and radio, including headlines, long form programs and talk.

To view the data, visit the PEJ website or learn more about it from the PEJ press release.