Peeking out from under the news bubble

Before travelling to a new country, I like to set a Google alert on the name of the country to get a sense of its big news stories. I've written before about how shockingly little information appears on the web about some countries, but I've finally found some evidence about why this happens. Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, gave a great talk at TED 2007 on the subject of news coverage. The image below sums up the essence of her presentation by showing the number of seconds of American network and cable news coverage devoted to each country. Beyond the graphics she also highlighted some depressing stats like the fact that coverage of Russia, China, and India (over 1/3 of the world's population) produced just one percent of the news coverage. More embarassingly, the death of Anna Nicole Smith recieved more coverage than any foreign country except Iraq. 

While it would be easy to blame this on a "dumbed down" audience, Miller rightly highlights that national celebrity stories are a lot cheaper to cover especially as foreign bureaus are eliminated and entire continents (Africa and South America) are left with no network presence. I had assumed that online coverage might be more robust but Miller noted that the 14,000+ stories on Google News homepage only covered 24 unique stories. 

I'm optimisitic that online tools will eventually find a way to present better coverage about what's going on in the world. A company like Silobreaker has made some good efforts to elevate a broader set of news and add more context through visualisations. I supect that meta-analysis of a service like FriendFeed could yield a personalised, but not narrow, news service. I can't object to people wanting lots of news about Anna Nicole Smith but if the existing news services can't produce a more diverse picture then I hope some new companies will.