Media Cloud

Media Cloud is an open-source content analysis tool that aims to map news media coverage of current events. It "performs five basic functions -- media definition, crawling, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis." Media cloud "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 at Harvard University and launched in March 2009. It's distributed under the GNU GPL 3+.
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, etc.)
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