Though there is little doubt that the internet is fundamentally changing the ways that news is produced, distributed and consumed, how exactly is this revolution being shaped? As traditional media and online upstarts increasingly inhabit the same realms, questions arise over who is breaking the highest profile stories, how these stories are being covered by different outlets and how the coverage changes as we shift perspective from local to national to international.

Discovering the answers to these questions can reveal patterns within the new cycle, pointing to ways information is being shared, areas in the world that are receiving adequate coverage or going underreported and potentially could lead to uncovering biases that exist within specific outlets. But until recently, the infrastructure to undertake such an endeavor on such a broad scope didn’t exist.

Researchers at the Berkman Center are hoping to step in and fill that void with a open-source project that does the heavy computing. The web-based service, called Media Cloud, offers a platform for open, collaborative research that can produce visual or textual results to user queries. Though still in the early stages of development, the site will eventually be able to simultaneously track thousands of news sources from stalwarts like the Washington Post and the Guardian to high-profile blogs like the Huffington Post and Politico, providing users with a broad perspective on the evolving media landscape.

As reported in the New York Times, the designers have started testing out the system’s capabilities with a couple interesting lines of inquiry:

“Who has the power to place an idea on the national agenda is another question that Mr. Benkler said Media Cloud could help answer. For instance, how is the conversation about the recession and the financial crash shaped?” and “How does rhetoric change over time, and what’s the role of the Internet and the mainstream media in that?”

Needless to say, this an exciting service and one that has many implications, from discovering which individuals or institutions are “making” the news to helping us better able to understand the constant barrage of information confronting us at every turn.