Zimbabwe has sentenced Simon Mann, alleged Equatorial Guinea coup plotter, to seven years in jail for weapons violations. The pilots of the plane that landed in Zimbabwe got 16 months, the passengers, a year. While the BBC reports that these sentences are “stiffer than the men would have expected”, it’s worth remembering that, as the situation unfolded, Mugabe and crew were making noise about finding ways to charge the alleged mercenaries with capital crimes. No word yet on what fate will befall the other 16 alleged mercenaries held in Equatorial Guinea.

In other Zim news, World Press Review has a pair of excellent articles on Mugabe’s systematic war on dissent. Julius Dawu’s “A Death Knell for Zimbabwe’s Press”, which talks about Information Minister Jonathan Moyo’s threats against “mercenary journalists” – that is to say, any journalist who freelances for a non-state controlled paper. Dawu quotes Moyo:

“We will not allow Bush’s boys in our midst … The situation in Zimbabwe today calls for principled actions without fear or favour, and without succumbing to any threats or intimidation. Mercenaries of any kind, whether carrying the sword or the pen, must and will be exposed and they will suffer full consequences of the law,”

Dawu’s second article on WPR is an overview of press arrests in Zimbabwe in late 2003.

Zimbabwe has sentenced Simon Mann, alleged Equatorial Guinea coup plotter, to seven years in jail for weapons violations. The pilots of the plane that landed in Zimbabwe got 16 months, the passengers, a year. While the BBC reports that these sentences are “stiffer than the men would have expected”, it’s worth remembering that, as the situation unfolded, Mugabe and crew were making noise about finding ways to charge the alleged mercenaries with capital crimes. No word yet on what fate will befall the other 16 alleged mercenaries held in Equatorial Guinea.

In other Zim news, World Press Review has a pair of excellent articles on Mugabe’s systematic war on dissent. Julius Dawu’s “A Death Knell for Zimbabwe’s Press”, which talks about Information Minister Jonathan Moyo’s threats against “mercenary journalists” – that is to say, any journalist who freelances for a non-state controlled paper. Dawu quotes Moyo:

“We will not allow Bush’s boys in our midst … The situation in Zimbabwe today calls for principled actions without fear or favour, and without succumbing to any threats or intimidation. Mercenaries of any kind, whether carrying the sword or the pen, must and will be exposed and they will suffer full consequences of the law,”

Dawu’s second article on WPR is an overview of press arrests in Zimbabwe in late 2003.

As regular readers of my blog know, I’m interested in trying to paint a statistical picture of media coverage of the developing world. Last year, I found some pretty good evidence that the majority of media sources I was examining were far more likely to report on stories in wealthy nations than in poor ones. As I started talking with friends who worked in mainstream media, I got a fairly consistent explanation: “We report on what our audience wants. And, generally speaking, our audience doesn’t care about the developing world.”

This is the kind of explanation that begs for empirical testing. (Well, it does if you’re me.) Do newspapers and TV stations actually know that their readers aren’t interested in these stories? Or are they guessing?

So I’ve been looking for good proxies that I can use to measure audience interest in the developing world. One I’m interested in is book purchasing – I’ve been looking at Amazon sales rank statistics to make educated guesses at the number and value of books Amazon users purchase on various topics. And I’ve been looking closely at what countries people mention in their blogs, using data from Blogpulse and Daypop to map what parts of the world people are speaking about.

I decided to try a slightly different tactic earlier this week, and banged out a little code that scrapes headlines from the New York Times’s website, and checks to see which articles are subsequently mentioned in the blogosphere. My guess was that the stories bloggers would “amplify” would predominantly be ones regarding US electoral politics and technology, especially consumer and Internet technology.

What follows below are the first results – of the 718 headlines that ran on the New York Times website my scrapers found in the last three days (these include stories published much earlier, but still appearing on the site), only 58 had found their way into Blogpulse’s database. (I’m working on a Technorati version at the moment so we can compare and check Blogpulse’s comprehensiveness.) My script looks for the URL, rather than the headline, so the observation: “The Times ran a story today on Chechnya” won’t be counted unless it links to a specific headline’s URL. (I’d love thoughts from folks on whether, by searching for URLs like “http://www.nytimes.com/date/section/article.html”, I’m missing a group of otherwise-blogged URLs…)

(Update – thanks to Kerim Friedman for pointing out that many people link to http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink, instead of the NY Times site – I’ll modify scripts later today to look at this…)

Of the twenty stories blogged more than once, only two were substantially about events outside the US. One involved US/Israeli espionage, the other, terror in Chechnya. US electoral politics dominated, with 11 stories directly related to the US presidential race. Tech had a weaker showing than expected, with three stories; surprisingly popular were stories that touched on education in the US, with four stories, including the most blogged story, on charter schools.

A listing of the 58 stories blogged at least once follows below. I’ll be running this experiment for the next month or so, and hope to expand it to follow other media sources as well – if I get the bugs worked out, I’ll start publishing regular results on my research page. Any and all insights you might have are welcome…

• Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal: 9
• Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar: 6
• Subpoena Seeks Records About Delegate Lists on Web: 4
• Frank Rich: How Kerry Became a Girlie-Man: 4
• Confrontations: Protesters’ Encounters With Delegates on the Town Turn Ugly: 4
• Vast Anti-Bush Rally Greets Republicans in New York: 3
• Spy Case Renews Debate Over Pro-Israel Lobby’s Ties to Pentagon: 3
• The Democratic Nominee: Kerry Enlisting Clinton Aides in Effort to Refocus Campaign: 3
• School Siege: Russian Rebels Had Precise Plan: 3
• The Platform: Social Conservatives Wield Influence on Platform: 3
• Letting Gamers Play God, and Now Themselves: 3
• The Vice President’s Daughter: Cheney Daughter’s Political Role Disappoints Some Gay Activists: 2
• Bush Backs Ending Admission Preferences for Children of Alumni: 2
• Upbeat Republicans Revive Bush Theme of Compassion: 2
• In Retreat, Bush Says U.S. Will Win War on Terrorism: 2
• Effort by Bush on Education Faces Obstacles in the StatesNews Analysis: Bush Offers Bold Strokes, but Few Details in Speech: 2
• News Analysis: First Night, Single Theme for Double Term: Sept. 11: 2
• School Achievement Reports Often Exclude the Disabled: 2
• The Religion Issue: A Call to ‘Win This Culture War’: 2
• A Commercial Software Service Aims to Outfox Caller ID: 1
• It All Started With a Good Cup of Coffee: 1
• Cheney and G.O.P. Mount Vigorous Assault on Kerry: 1
• The California Governor: Arnold Schwarzenegger Takes to Limelight Again: 1
• Building a Better Soundtrap: 1
• In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards: 1
• Bush Is ‘Unfit’ to Lead U.S., Kerry Charges: 1
• Demonstrations: At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protesters Clash With Police: 1
• Europe Opens Another Microsoft Inquiry: 1
• Bush Outlines Plan for a 2nd Term and Attacks Kerry’s Record: 1
• The Former Mayor: Mr. Popular by All Counts, Is He Republican Enough?: 1
• Clinton Surgery Puts Attention on Death Rate: 1
• Sunny San Diego Finds Itself Being Viewed as a Kind of Enron-by-the-Sea: 1
• 9/11 Proposals Lead the Agenda Facing Congress: 1
• Craig’s To-Do List: Leave Millions on the Table: 1
• The Running Mates: Cheney’s Praise of Bush Takes a Dig at Clinton (and Reagan): 1
• Under Attack, Director Says Hollinger’s Black Misled Him: 1
• Jobless Figures on Friday Could Emphasize Bush’s Big Weakness: 1
• Game Theory: The Eerie Allure of Ghosts and the Electoral College: 1
• Democratic Strategies: Democrats Urge Kerry to Turn Up Intensity of Campaign: 1
• Products Slide Into More TV Shows, With Help From New Middlemen: 1
• Techno Files: In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype: 1
• For Low-Income High Schoolers, a Harvard Education: 1
• Essay: In a Wife’s Request at Her Husband’s Deathbed, Ethics Are an Issue: 1
• Arrests: Facing Fine, City Frees Hundreds of Detainees: 1
• State of the Art: From Microsoft, a First Take: 1
• Back-to-School Issue: When Gadgets Get in the Way: 1
• The Context: On Labor Day, Nominees Have Work to Do: 1
• Officials Unraveling Woes of Texas Schools: 1
• The Candidates: Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable:
• The Party Hosts: Money and Power Cross Paths, and a Good Time Is Had by All: 1
• E-Commerce Report: EBay Lends Hand to Dropoff Stores: 1
• Road Trip: Yes, New York Messed With Texans: 1
• Fox Outdraws Big 3 Networks: 1
• News Analysis: In Trying Time, Scaling Down Expectations of Job Growth: 1
• Putting Nature on the Pill: 1
• Intelligence: General Says Less Coercion of Captives Yields Better Data: 1
• Florida Court Rules Against Religious School Vouchers: 1