As of today, I have been compiling a news archive on world politics for roughly more than a year. What started out between two friends as a curious project spurred by an intrinsic desire to know the buzz of contemporary world politics, evolved into a 200+ pages long searchable archive. I believe the archive requires some trimming and polishing for better versatility, however, it is already useful this way.  Working daily on the same thing for more than a year comes with some perks. Here are what I learned during this process.

• There is really something called a Great Power

As I have mentioned, our archive is searchable. This means it includes almost all the issues a state has had itself tangled in. It appears that while for example Egypt has a couple of issues going on according to international media, the USA seems to have a say, if not a policy for almost all of the prominent issues that hit the news.  It might be due to my selection bias, or publishing on what Egypt has to say about North Korea might not be making money for news agencies. Yet, even if these are true, I believe defining a state as a Great Power by looking at the number of issues it is involved in makes sense.

• Too much is going on one day

Even if you confine yourself to headlines, too much is happening in the world daily, for one person to absorb. Looking back, there were weeks I had collected more than 90 pieces within 7 days. It roughly equals to 12 news articles per day; most of them about different parts of the world. It is now clear for me why hard working Foreign Ministers and Heads of States rarely sleep or take a vacation.

• News get lost on the Internet

Since I went online in 1998, I lived by one code and once code only: what happens on the internet, stays on the internet. Forever! It appears that this is not quite right for news pieces. No, I’m not talking about some shadowy people deleting critical information off the face of the earth. It is the ever-changing URLs that make news disappear, get relocated and lose their credibility. Let me show you what I mean with an example. On May 21^st, 2015, The Associated Press published a report entitled “Ukraine lawmakers suspend military cooperation with Russia.” I added this piece, along with its URL to the archive. By then AP was using m.apnews.com/ syntax for mobile news. Yet, they changed it to http://bigstory.ap.org/ and killed all previous links by June 2015. Now if you google the title of the now-lost news article, hoping to get an equally credible source that had published the original AP story, you get exactly the same piece, word-by-word but from the Jakarta Post. Although the Jakarta Post might be doing an awesome coverage of the Ukrainian crisis, I would definitely prefer the original AP link if I were to refer to this piece.

• Timeless clichés never get old

More than often, analyzing international politics requires in-depth knowledge of a particular event, along with the same intensity of information about other possible issues that the particular development may be related to. It is surely a tough job few can cope with and when this thorough knowledge is lacking, timeless clichés about incognito men pushing the buttons to disrupt a region; states taking the bait and great games in the Middle East fill in the blanks. These are so prevalent that even some of the most renowned analysts throw them in shamelessly.

• News is just the tip of the iceberg

Speak of the clichés and you will end up using one yourself. However, this time “the tip of the iceberg” really explains something. In the beginning of this endeavor for archiving news on world politics, I thought collecting news would make me feel more knowledgeable about the things going on in the world. But now, a year on and I feel like I have mountains of issues to learn about to reach the standards I set for myself.  For example: I learnt that Turkey had oil extracting agreements for the PKK-held Qandil mountain[1]. Had no idea before. Or, more than often we tend to assume that once a crisis erupts between two states, most of the relations between them are put on hold.  However, Russia and Ukraine have ongoing energy agreements and negotiations on this matter[2] despite Russian involvement in the country.

[1] Türkİye Kandİl’de petrol arayacak – http://ajtr.me/pmkf

[2] ​50,000 Tons of Russian Coal Enter Ukraine http://on.rt.com/QA96LM