Yesterday while researching an article on graphical interfaces for search engines I serendipitously came across the Global Attention Profiles project. I'm drawn to this project as last year, while working on a website for an international flags company, I realised that there are many countries that the media hardly ever touches upon.
 Ethan Zuckerman produces daily maps of the relative amount of news coverage given to the nations of the world. Most interestingly he is attempting to uncover the underlying reasons for the inequalities in news coverage. So far his results are strongly suggestive, that for most media sources, coverage is most closely related to GDP.He does cite an exception to this which is the BBC, where its output correlates most strongly to population.
Reading Ethan's thought's on the importance of global media attention I was stuck by the incident that had motivated him to begin the project:
"On Monday April 7th, one of sites I rely on to bridge my personal information gap, AllAfrica.com, reported that there was a possible massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Drodro area of the Ituri region, a region known for deadly ethnic conflict. I immediately headed for the online edition of the New York Times... and found nothing. Three clicks in, I found an AP wire story. I went to news.google.com to see if other news sources were reporting the story. News.google listed roughly 1200 articles, most on the ongoing peace process attempting to end the deadly conflict taking place in the northeastern part of the country.
Early reports suggested that 966 people had been killed in the massacre, most with machetes. Like many Africa-watchers, I wondered if we were seeing the beginning of a massacre like the ones in Rwanda in 1994.
In my search results, putting these killings in context was a report from the International Rescue Committee, a widely respected NGO, arguing that the conflict in Congo has been the most deadly since World War II, causing 3.3 million deaths. So why wasn't this tragedy on the front page of the New York Times?" Link
I remember reading that story, as I aqlso follow reports from AllAfrica.com. Though I mentioned the non-reporting of this particular story to my friends, unlike Ethan, I did nothing more and marked it down as an anomalous feature of global reporting.
So I'm going to be experimenting with exploring issues from countries that we rarely hear about. I'll certainly be using Ethans's maps as a guide to where to focus on because if no one else is looking, then I'm sure there'll be something interesting going on.
12:19:14 AM 
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