Okay, so I got this idea kicking around in my head about the New York Times, the NYT. Been seeing their headlines everywhere, obviously, and I started wondering if they’d changed much over, say, the last year or so. Like, the general vibe of them. Seemed like a simple enough thing to check, right? Just a little personal experiment.
Getting Started
First thing, I needed headlines. Lots of them. Didn’t want to get fancy with code or anything, just wanted to see what I could grab easily. So, I decided to just focus on the main homepage headlines. My plan was pretty basic: visit the site, grab the top few headlines, save ’em somewhere. Repeat.
I figured I’d do this for a few key points in time over the past year. Maybe grab a week’s worth from last month, then jump back six months, grab another week, then back a full year. Seemed manageable.
The Actual Work – Collecting Stuff
This part was… well, it was work. Not complicated, just a bit tedious.
- Opened up my browser every day for the chosen weeks.
- Copied the main headlines I saw right on the front page. Usually the top 5 or so.
- Pasted them into a simple text file first, date-stamped.
- Later, I organized everything into a basic spreadsheet. Column for the date, columns for the headlines.
Yeah, it was manual. Took a bit of time each day I was doing the collection. Sometimes the site layout changed a tiny bit, or figuring out which was the ‘main’ headline took a second look. But I got my raw data, a list of headlines from those different points in time.
Looking at the Words
Once I had the headlines listed out, I just started reading them. Seriously, just reading them grouped by the date period. Didn’t use any complex analysis software. My main tool was just my spreadsheet program.
I started looking for simple things:
- Were words like ‘crisis’, ‘warning’, ‘fear’ appearing more often now compared to a year ago?
- What about positive or neutral words?
- Were the topics shifting dramatically? More politics, less culture, or vice-versa?
I started highlighting words in the spreadsheet. Yellow for negative-ish, green for positive-ish, blue for neutral or just factual reporting stuff. It wasn’t scientific, just my gut feeling looking at the words.
What I Noticed (My Simple Take)
Honestly, after staring at it for a while, it wasn’t some huge night-and-day difference, at least not in the small sample I grabbed. Sure, the specific topics changed based on what was happening in the world, that’s obvious. Politics seemed pretty constant as a major focus.
Maybe there was a slight uptick in more ‘urgent’ sounding words in the more recent batch compared to the oldest ones, but it wasn’t overwhelming. Lots of headlines were just straight reporting – “This happened,” “So-and-so said this.”
It felt like the topics shifted more than the overall tone of the headline words themselves, if that makes sense. But again, this was just my little experiment, looking at a tiny slice. No grand conclusions here.
Wrapping It Up
So yeah, that was my little dive into NYT headlines. It was mostly an exercise in manual data collection and basic observation. Took some time, didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering, but it satisfied my curiosity. It’s funny how you can get an impression of something, but checking it, even in a simple way like this, gives you a slightly different picture. Or maybe just confirms you need way more data to really know anything for sure. Anyway, that’s what I did.