Over 100,000 articles and social media mentions worldwide were published about paralympian Oscar Pistorius on Tuesday when he took to the witness stand at his murder trial.

This is according to South African media monitoring firm Data Driven Insight (DDI) Africa, which compiled this data using a smart search tool called NewsDesk.

Tonya Khoury, managing director for DDI, has told ITWeb Africa that the data set behind the Oscar Pistorius measurement includes 60,000 online publications across the globe, 2,000 South African hard copy print publications, and 66 of South Africa’s radio and television stations.

DDI also included 6.2 million social network posts from media organisations and the likes of individual ‘tweeters’ as part of its data set. Khoury has told ITWeb Africa that the data excludes ‘simple retweets’ while only including a retweet if there is a change to the content.

Pistorius is on trial in Pretoria, South Africa after shooting his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, in February last year.

Dubbed the ‘trial of the century’, the court proceedings are being broadcast live on television and radio stations across the globe. The world’s top news websites ranging from the BBC to The New York Times are also covering the court proceedings as they unfold.

Key moments emerged in the trial on Tuesday as a teary Pistorius described to the court his version of what happened when he shot his girlfriend through a toilet door in his home.

“The trial has generated more press than I have seen in my 15 years in media monitoring,” Khoury told ITWeb Africa.

“Not only is this media enormous, but it is globally huge. SA is currently on the world media stage and in conversation in almost every corner of the planet,” Khoury said.

Khoury has further told ITWeb Africa that; surprisingly, South Africa is only the fifth largest media generator on the trial worldwide as the US, UK, Australia and Germany lead with more coverage.

This week, the Pistorius trial has also overshadowed other important news stories in South Africa, according to the DDI data.

Stories eclipsed by Pistorius coverage include those on the debacle surrounding President Jacob Zuma’s R200 million upgrades to his Nkandla home and the extradition of British businessman and murder-accused Shrien Dewani to Cape Town.

Over a 24 hour period between Tuesday and Wednesday this week, a graphic from DDI shows how the Nkandla scandal was measured 16.46% of the time when against the Pistorius trial which was mentioned 51.9% in media mentions. Dewani, meanwhile, has 28.27% of mentions when compared to Pistorius and Nkandla.

However, these results also vary when media refers to both Dewani and Oscar together in stories that, for instance, focus on how South Africa’s judicial system is under the spotlight.

“When we compare Dewani to Oscar we see the two are generating almost equal news, because the news media are comparing the two cases but if we take Dewani without mention of Oscar, the Dewani trial generated only 8.47% against the Oscar’s 91.53%,” Khoury told ITWeb Africa.

Meanwhile, search engine Google also provides insights into how interest in the Pistorius trial has soared this week.

According to Google Trends, over 20,000 searches for the term ‘Oscar Pistorius’ were made in South Africa on Monday alone.