Media Cloud is an open-source

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 content analysis

Content analysis

Content analysis or textual analysis is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Earl Babbie defines it as "the study of recorded human communications, such as books, websites, paintings and laws."According to Dr...

 tool that aims to map news media

News media

The news media are those elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public.These include print media , broadcast news , and more recently the Internet .-Etymology:A medium is a carrier of something...

 coverage of current events. It "performs five basic functions -- media definition, crawling

Web crawler

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...

, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis." It "tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database ... enable[s] researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered." Media Cloud was developed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...

 at Harvard University and launched in March 2009.

As of October 2011, Media Cloud tracks news from mostly U.S. sources. It "collects news stories" in sets from:

• "Top 25 mainstream media sources from the U.S. according to the Google Ad Planner service" (includes New York Times, BBC
  BBC
  The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
  
  , etc.)
• "1000 most influential U.S. political blogs according to Technorati
  Technorati
  Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. By June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media...
  
  " (examples include Outside the Beltway http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/otbabout1/)
• "1000 most popular feeds in Bloglines
  Bloglines
  Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator for reading syndicated feeds using the RSS and Atom formats. Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist, founded the site in June 2003 and sold it in February 2005 to Ask.com/InterActiveCorp. In 2005, it hosted more than 200 million searchable blog articles. On...
  
  " (such as Gawker)
• "All public feeds from whitehouse.gov
  Whitehouse.gov
  Whitehouse.gov is the official website of the White House and is owned by the United States government. Launched in October 1994, it contains general American history information, as well as current news pertaining to the President, press briefings, proclamations, executive orders, and any speeches...
  
  "