Inter-coder reliability in the TV News Archive: A Report on Coding Issues, Countries and Actors in Belgian television news

The News Archive is a continuous television news monitoring service that exists since 2003 and is hosted by the Media Policy Research Centre (steunpunt Media), a consortium including research groups from the four Flemish (Belgian) universities in which news and mass media analyses are done. All flagship newscasts of both the most important commercial (vtm) and public (Eén) broadcaster of Flanders (Belgium) are daily archived and coded. More specifically, information about the countries, issues and actors involved in news items are coded and stored together with the actual video footage of the news item. The main aim of the News Archive is to monitor the news and to report to and inform the media policy, and to feed the public en policy debate about the news content. Besides this, it also presents the scholarly community with an easy accessible database that allows for the quick retrieval of news items dealing with certain issues, actors or countries. As such more specific secondary coding can be executed. This report briefly introduces the archive and focuses on the training procedures of coders and inter coder reliability test results. Inter coder results show that inter coder values (Krippendorf α) of actors and countries are highly satisfactory. For issues, only major issue categories produce reliable results. These findings are discussed in light of maintaining a continuous census television news dataset.