Mapping the International: Global and Local Salience and News-Links Between Countries in Popular News Sites Worldwide

What countries get more online news attention around the world? The following paper compares 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages in order to assess the salience of countries in different news topic, their level of self-occupation, their news-links with other countries and their network configuration during a period of six months between February and July 2009. Based on special text-mining tools developed by the author for this purposes, it offers new indices, measurements, and techniques to portray the world perceived by news sites in different countries. Supporting previous observations on newspapers and traditional media, findings indicate that there is a strong correlation between the economic power of a country and its online news salience. The U.S. is by far the most salient country in popular news sites around the world. Middle-Eastern countries receive particularly high attention in world news, Asian countries in business and technology news and European countries in cultural news. Countries with higher political, economic, or social instabilities tend to be more self-occupied in their news. The networks of news-links within different countries display three different structures: centralized networks presented by American and French news sites, two-hub networks presented by most European and Asian news sites, and decentralized networks presented by Middle-Eastern news sites. The implications of these findings are discussed.