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Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.

Media Cloud is a project that tracks news content comprehensively - providing open, free, and flexible tools. This will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends. For instance, some of our driving questions are: 1. Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around? 2. What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources? 3. Where do stories begin? 4. How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications? 5. Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source? 6. How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage? 7. Can we track news cycles for specific issues? 8. Do online comments shape the news?