How Milky Way reads a country

1. Two samples. From inside: articles by media headquartered in the country, about the country. From outside: articles about the country by media headquartered anywhere else. All open-access, collected .
2. What makes the cut. Each article gets an importance score: higher when several outlets cover the same event, when it comes from a major outlet, and for politics, economy, society, international and environment news; lower for minor crime stories. Deals, sponsored content, horoscopes, games, sport and celebrity news are left out. From outside, an article is kept only if its headline names the country, its capital or its leader. Each side keeps its 12 to 15 best-scored articles, most important first.
3. One list of categories. Every story is filed under one category — Politics, Economy & finance, Society, International, Environment or Culture — and both samples use the same list, so the filters compare like with like.
4. The lens gap — not a score. For each country, a few cards name what one press covers that the other leaves out. Each card gives the subject, one factual sentence, the number of articles on each side and links to them. Select a card to see its articles.

   Silence abroad

   A subject present in the domestic press and absent from the foreign press sampled here.

   Blind spot at home

   A subject present in the foreign press and absent from the domestic press sampled here.

   Same story, different angle

   A subject covered on both sides, where each side reports different aspects. The card says what each side reports, attributed to the outlets.

5. How gaps are found.
6. Other languages. Headlines not written in English are machine-translated into English by DeepL; the original headline is shown in small type underneath.
7. Music mode. A separate section of the edition, collected with its own requests: music news in each country’s languages, filed as concerts & festivals, new releases or artists, with the region when an article names one. It has no inside and outside views and no lens gap — only the most relevant music news of each country, each item linked to its source.
8. Time travel. The timeline at the bottom of the screen goes back to the year 1; its scale gives more room to recent centuries. It holds about 1,100 major events from every continent — battles, empires, revolutions, treaties, independences, discoveries, epidemics — each with a neutral summary and a link to the English Wikipedia article used as its source. Only well-established dates are included. Events are placed on today’s map: present-day borders are shown for reference only.
9. Neutral by construction. Outlets are labelled by ownership — public, private, agency, state-owned or state-funded — never by political leaning. Summaries attribute claims to the outlet that made them, and every summary links to its sources.

Limits, stated plainly

Samples are small — articles a side — and drawn only from open-access sources: outlets that refuse automated access are missing. “Absent” means absent from this sample, not from a country’s whole press. Matching by words can miss a subject written differently, and standfirsts are not translated. Machine translation can be imperfect: the original headline is always shown. The edition is refreshed automatically each day.