The blog L'Observatoire des Médias posted world maps of attention paid to the media in 164 countries in the world and received links from Gawker and Boing Boing.  The numbers included the blogosphere as a whole and 10 media organizations, including the New York Times and the Economist.

Each country is either stretched or shrunk on the map, depending on its share of media attention. The cartogram to the left is an analysis for the Wall Street Journal, showing a flattened Africa and South America and an augmented Western Europe.


Blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril retrieved the numbers by manually searching the Web sites of 10 news organizations and Google Blog Search for articles containing the names of countries. He also counted and mapped the search results. He expects this process to be automated in a few months, using data scraping, to run more trials.

The numbers ran for each country against a model that Kayser-Bril constructed to approximate that country's importance, including: the country's Human Development Index, area, population, GDP, budget expenditures and number of U.S. soldiers present, accounted for more than half of the variation in countries' media coverage, according to Kayser-Bril. 

There were challenges, for example distinguishing new stories about the African nation of Chad from the rock singer Chad Kroeger. Kayser-Bril instead used capital cities for Chad, Georgia, and Jordan, and then multiplied the results by five (the typical ratio between search-engine hits for a country and for its capital, according to Kayser-Bril.). Another example: Not every article about the U.S. contains the search term  United States."

Kayser-Bril concedes that the algorithm is not very accurate:
- It counts each article equally, no matter the length or prominence.
- Search engines are not reliable. He noticed that "when you do the same search twice, you don't [get] the same numbers."
- The maps can be misleading, because it "makes countries with low population density, such as Mongolia and Canada, appear to be getting short shrift."

Ethan Zuckerman, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said the work is important for showing how undercovered some countries are: "When you're not paying attention to a country, you don't trade with it; you don't send relief to it; you don't have to intervene in it."

Source: WSJ through Cyberjournalist.net