Last week I wrote a post mentioning that I thought coverage of the 2008 Presidential election would lead news organization to push the envelop in terms of innovation in online coverage. Cyberjournalist has the scoop on just such an innovation from the Washington Post and Daylife – Issue Tracker.

Issues Tracker allows you to select Presidential candidates to get an idea of the amount of press coverage they attract around issues such as abortion, immigration and education. Visitors can also select an issue to view how the candidates compare in terms of the volume of press coverage. I find this tool particular interesting since as it is similar to tools we have on our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform.

A couple of things that I think are significant about Issues Tracker:

• The tool aggregates stories from all across the web. Newspapers have traditionally been reluctant to link to competitors, i.e. other news outlets. It is nice to see the Post recognizes that this is an archaic way of thinking.
• The piece functions as a widget that you can insert in your website (see below). Very cool, although they might want to offer a less full featured version – that is a huge chunk of code to include on your site in any sort of permanent way.