>>Even in the anecdotal area, why are the deaths of the caricaturists more noteworthy than the others in France occurring during the attacks last week? For me the muslimic policeman also killed would be more noteworthy, if the anecdote is true at all.
>>
>>And the numbers of [innocent ?] non-combatants killed in Afghanistan and surrounding areas drowns those 17 from Paris if you focus on numbers.
>
>There should be a statistic somewhere (I'd be surprised if it didn't exist already, but it wouldn't be googlable at all) of how many dead at a time are newsworthy, per country of origin vs country of publishing. Let's say "in a newspaper in Botswana, it is not news if a number of Estonians die in the same event, unless there were at least nnn of them". Find the number for each pair of countries. That would explain why 17 French matter more than 50 Pakistanis.

As a first cut, consider degree of separation i.e.

Newsworthiness = ( # dead ) / ( average degree of separation from reader(s) )

UPDATE: better might be sum of individual deaths, each divided by an inverse power factor of degree of separation i.e.

Newsworthiness = SUM[ 1 / ( ( FactorN ) ^ ( degree of separation from readers ) ) ]

That way:

- A large number of deaths of people unknown and far away ( high degree of separation ) would be steeply discounted

- A single death could make it newsworthy e.g. your local newspaper reporting the death of someone from your town in Serbia, amongst a group of 12 otherwise unknown people dying in an avalanche on Everest