Trends in the spread of global news in the English language

Abstract

Analyzing the flow of news across national boundaries can increase our understanding of a country's perspective of the global scene. This paper utilized the GDELT Project's database of English news articles to determine the trends in the global coverage of international news topics. The distributions of the time delays before a country catches on a particular news topic were studied. It was found that major countries, such as the United States, and countries with an English-speaking population generally have smaller time delays in publishing articles written in the English language. By using average linkage hierarchical clustering, common trends in the distributions of publishing time lags were determined and countries following the same patterns were found. The clustering of these distributions correlate with the geographical proximity of the countries.