(If for some reason this embed doesn't display some of the maps mentioned below, you can go here to see the whole thing, in English.)

Via Boing Boing, I found these amazing histograms of news coverage by country. Information like this is sometimes predictable (Australia is big in the map of "The Australian's" news) but eye-opening at times. BB notes that Israel/Palestine with an 8M population but a heaping helping of the world's problems is almost always around the same size as India with it's whopping 1.2B population.

Some interesting observations: Russia's changing face hardly pays credit to the nation's importance -- for good or ill -- in the world today. For all we discuss China, it seems disproportionately small in many of the maps. The creator of the maps, Nicolas Kayser-Bril, wants to keep them updated continually as a way to push editors to improve their coverage. But he notes that the blogosphere map is the closest representation of a media landscape that looks like the actual landscape. He credits the unbeatable niche reporting talents of blogs. I tend to agree.