Introduction
El País is one of the most widely read newspapers in the Spanish-speaking world. As a regular reader of its Latin American edition, I noticed that coverage seemed unevenly distributed—most front-page stories appeared to come from Mexico.
To test this impression, I scraped every front-page article from 2018 using Python’s requests and beautifulsoup libraries.
Results
The El País front page is structured in HTML with articles enclosed in <article> tags. Each article’s title lives under the class "articulo-titulo", and its dateline under "articulo-localizacion".
Here’s the basic scraping setup:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
r = requests.get("https://elpais.com/elpais/portada_america.html")
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, "html.parser")
articles = soup.find_all("article", attrs={"class": "articulo"})
loc = soup.find_all("span", attrs={"class": "articulo-localizacion"})
By iterating through every day of 2018, I collected 33,285 articles:
- 17,368 had no location identified
- 703 distinct cities appeared
- 52 cities appeared more than 20 times
- Madrid led with 3,327 mentions, followed by Mexico City with 2,191
Figure 1: Frequency of cities with more than 20 appearances on the El País front page (Latin American edition, 2018).
Conclusion
Despite being the Latin American edition:
- Madrid still has the most front-page appearances
- Mexico City is second
- Two U.S. cities rank third and fourth
- Buenos Aires and Bogotá follow
Latin American cities are well represented overall, but the newspaper’s Spanish roots mean that Spanish news dominates—even in the edition aimed at Latin America.