Collecting and Coding the News of a Century: On the Intellectual and Technical Difficulties of an Automated Identification of the Inverted Pyramid Model in News Articles For Over a Hundred Years.

Automated content analysis poses distinct intellectual and technical challenges, especially when translating theoretical considerations (here from journalism research) into computable measures across changing media conditions. This methodological paper introduces and validates a diachronically robust operationalization of the so-called inverted pyramid model of journalistic news storytelling for German-language news articles over a hundred years. This form of news implies that the important W-questions (5W1H) should be answered at the beginning of a news story. Our operationalization focusses on the presence of the four W-elements – who, what, when, where – within the first 300 characters of a text. As a result of our critical examination, we decided not to detect how and why, as they are typically implicit and rarely lead-bound, making them less suitable for reliable automation in longitudinal settings. Before coding, substantial barriers to (historical) data access – such as incomplete digitization and limited machine readability – shaped the sampling strategy and analytical design. We want to provide a critical reflection on the methodological assumptions, constraints, and possibilities involved in operationalizing journalism’s structural features through automated means in both collecting and coding.