News by country

Use the FIPS code, not the ISO code

Country identifiers follow FIPS 10-4. That matters because it disagrees with ISO 3166 for several large markets, and passing the wrong one returns results rather than an error — so the mistake surfaces as strange data, not as a failure.

Two different geographic questions

country matches the places an article is about. A piece on Brazilian agriculture written in Chicago matches Brazil.

publisher_country matches where the publisher is based. The same article matches the United States.

Most monitoring wants the first. Most media analysis wants the second. Using one when you meant the other produces a result set that looks plausible and answers a question you did not ask.

What a country filter cannot separate on its own

A country constraint answers where, and almost every useful question also has a whose and a which-language attached to it. Domestic reporting and international commentary about the same market coexist in one unscoped result set, and in the larger markets the international half is frequently the larger one — so a query that looks like coverage of a country is often coverage of how that country is being discussed elsewhere. Adding a language constraint separates the two more reliably than any ranking adjustment, because the domestic press writes in the domestic language and outside commentary usually does not.

Outlet concentration is the other thing the filter cannot tell you. Two countries with the same article count can have very different publisher distributions, and a market where three outlets produce half the volume is reached differently from one where a hundred produce it evenly. Each country page reports its own concentration alongside the totals for exactly this reason: the volume figure tells you how much was published, and the spread tells you how many newsrooms it came from, which is usually the number a decision actually depends on.

Every country with a page

A further 20 countries carry enough data to filter on but do not yet have a page — the filter works for every country the index covers, whether or not one is listed here. Provisional figures, pending a snapshot taken against the API.