This dashboard draws on every article published in The New York Times from January 2000 to the present, retrieved through the NYT Archive API and updated monthly. Errors in the API or in the function of the website could yield spurious conclusions, so users should independently verify any findings.
The New York Times Archive API indexes all document types published on nytimes.com — news, opinion, reviews, obituaries, and interactives — and this dashboard includes all of them.
That includes both standard articles and blog content, like those hosted at subdomains blogs.nytimes.com, dealbook.nytimes.com, and krugman.blogs.nytimes.com. Blog posts were typically much shorter (averaging 100–460 words vs. 600–900 for non-blog articles), published in higher volume, often without an author name attached. The posts from blogs (ArtsBeat, CityRoom, The Caucus, The Lede, Economix, Bits, Wheels, Fifth Down, Straight Sets, and more) peaked at nearly 56% of all indexed articles in 2009. Blog indexing then declined steadily as the NYT wound down its blog properties between 2013 and 2018; by 2019, essentially no content is published at blog subdomains.
Content from The Athletic is not available in the Archive API and is therefore absent, which is why Sports coverage appears to decline sharply after the NYT's 2022 acquisition of that publication.
Author name variants are merged when they likely refer to the same person. For example, "Jonah E. Bromwich" and "Jonah Bromwich" are treated as one byline when first and last names match and middle names are compatible. Cases where the same reporter has many articles under both a shorter and a fuller form are reconciled manually after cross-checking beats, sections, and year ranges.
Institutional bylines — The Associated Press, The Editorial Board, Reuters, and similar non-person attributions — are excluded from author rankings, because they don't represent individual reporting output.
Staff versus freelance status and role (reporter, editor, photographer, critic, etc.) are drawn from each reporter's NYT bio page where available. For reporters who lack a custom bio page, no classification is given.
The API includes a word count of each article, but has some anomalies. Interactive and multimedia pieces including data visualizations and photo essays are typically indexed with a word count of zero, even when they contain substantial reporting. Interactives make up roughly 10% of New York Times Magazine items in the API and a growing share of digital-native journalism. Word-count statistics for sections with heavy interactive output (Magazine, Upshot, Visual Investigations) and for individual authors who shifted toward multimedia formats therefore understate actual editorial output.
The beat topics shown on reporter profiles are derived from the NYT's own subject tags. When a reporter covers a subject twice as frequently (as a share of their overall coverage) as the newspaper as a whole, and has written a minimum of two articles about the subject, it is classified as a beat. Authors with few articles, or few articles carrying subject tags, may have no beats listed.
The NYT has renamed, merged, and discontinued sections over the years. To preserve thematic continuity, this dashboard applies the following merges:
Technical categories, product sections, branded-content labels, and small stubs — newsletter and podcast aggregators, discontinued apps, TV tie-ins, blogs without a clear section home — are excluded entirely from the Sections tab. This includes "Archives" (predominantly paid death notices), "Booming" (a 2012–2014 baby-boomer lifestyle blog), "UrbanEye" (a NYC events newsletter), and "Guide" (a going-out listings service).
Authors are assigned a primary section based on where they have published the most articles over their full career in the dataset; this is used to sort and filter the Reporters table. Author profiles also list every section in which the author has published, reflecting the full range of their work. Primary section is a rough proxy for desk assignment and may be inaccurate for reporters whose focus shifts across years.
Analysis of national coverage draws from articles in the "U.S." section and the "New York" section. Many articles in the latter section lack geographic tags, however, and are not included in the analysis. Locations internal to states (e.g., "Chicago") are mapped to their parent states.
Analysis of international coverage draws from articles in the "World" section. Articles with geographic tags that appear in other sections (Opinion, Business, etc.) are not included.
Population data for per-capita calculations come from the 2020 U.S. Census. Country populations come from the Natural Earth 110m Cultural Vectors dataset (the POP_EST field, which aggregates UN and World Bank figures).
Known quirks in the Archive API data, in chronological order. Where this dashboard applies a correction, it's noted explicitly.
Persons and organizations drawn from NYT keyword metadata. Check names to compare coverage over time; click a name to see details.
Loading subjects data…
Search NYT subject tags to find which journalists cover a topic. Tags are drawn from the NYT's own metadata.
Major editorial sections; some renamed or merged sections are combined. See the About tab for details.
Recurring columns and special coverage that span sections or don't fit neatly into the section taxonomy.
Draws on geographic tags from NYT metadata exclusively in articles from the "World" section. Tagging coverage appears to have been less consistent in 2000–2003.
Draws on geographic tags from NYT metadata in the "U.S." section and, optionally, "New York" section to encompass local coverage.
| to search for multiple terms in one line (e.g. iraq | iran)