Project for Excellence in Journalism The medium may indeed be the message. The Jan 7-12 News Coverage Index shows the Somalia conflict as the second most covered story online -- but it didn't crack the top five stories for newspapers.

On Jan. 8, the Project on Excellence in Journalism launched an intriguing new feature: its weekly News Coverage Index(current issue, archive). PEJ bills its NCI project as "the largest effort ever to measure and analyze the American news media on a continuing basis." It's published on Tuesdays.

PEJ has people monitoring and categorizing the content from 48 mainstream news outlets in real time. These venues (ranging from the New York Times and CNN to the Chattanooga Times Free Press) are in five main sectors: network TV news, newspapers, news sites, cable news, and radio news. (More on the methodology)

The team tallies which topics are being covered: "a broad sense of the American news agenda." The findings are then released in a weekly report "that features an index of the top stories, a narrative analyzing the twists, turns, and trajectory of the coverage, and a breakdown of the differences among media sectors."

PEJ is looking beyond the mainstream, too. "Separately, we will examine online blogs and late night comedy, which will be a basis for comparison with the NCI, but not embedded mathematically as part of it." Also, PEJ is negotiating with the Media Bloggers Association to develop an index of content from 100 selected MBA bloggers.

You can subscribe to receive the weekly NCI report by e-mail. That's cool, but here's what I'd also like to see:

• A feed for NCI reports and other updates. This isn't merely a subscription option. It might be intriguing to syndicate this information to news or journalism sites (like, maybe, Poynter Online?) -- or onto intranets for news orgs and j-schools.
• A list of their taxonomy or tags for news topics. I'd love it if you could click on any item in this list and graph, compare, and otherwise dig into the data for more nuanced, long-term context.
• A published dataset that researchers could mine for independent analysis -- or perhaps even use in mashups.
• The ability to compare coverage between venues.

PEJ apparently hopes to expand in at least some of these directions, according to this recent On the Media interview with PEJ associate director Mark Jurkowitz.