Who is getting better coverage in the press: more and more positive? Thanks to the aggregation of news on the internet, we can begin to answer these questions by measuring coverage cross the entire body of news.

And we can also begin to ask whether coverage is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is to say, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the ink or the momentum?

Daylife (full disclosure — I am a founder and consulting editor there) gathers and then analyzes thousands of sources, mainstream and blog. And so I asked them to ask their algorithms for answers to the questions above.

I tried to answer this more crudely here when I compared mentions of Obama and Clinton in the press vs. the polls. This showed much more coverage and growth in coverage — aka, momentum — for Obama, which backed up Politico’s contention that the media narrative had Obama with the momentum when the polls didn’t agree. The Gallup poll at the time showed Clinton solidly ahead with Obama not rising and even — inside the margin of error — falling a hair.

So one has to ask whether the press narrative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: If they say he has momentum, he will.

Daylife’s scientist and artist of the algorithm dug into these questions in the first of a series of posts that will track coverage of candidates across the body of news.

First, what we call the Spinometer. Ellis tracked both volume of coverage of Obama v. Clinton and also sentiment — aka, spin — in editorial pieces (that is, op-eds, columns, blog posts, and such — coverage other than straight AP stories). The volume is measured by mentions. The spin is measured by tracking a set of positive and negative words (which, of course, can change depending on the words you select, which Daylife will soon allow you to do).

Here’s what he found. The bottom lines track volume: solid for Hillary (no editorial comment intended), dashes for Obama. They track pretty closely and in this larger sample — unlike my prior very small sample — Clinton coverage tracks only a slight bit ahead of Obama’s.

But the red lines show the spin. Here you can see that, according to this analysis, Obama gets way better spin.

Note that lately, Obama’s poll numbers have been improving. That damned self-fulfilling prophecy?

Daylife’s Ellis also measured coverage by party. He took eight Democrats (including Al Gore) and 11 Republicans and even though the GOP headcount was higher, their headline count was lower.

Ellis also notes that coverage soared after the midterm elections. Like putting up Christmas decorations in malls after July 4, this shows that as we all suspected, the rush of coverage of the presidential election exploded two years before voting day.

Finally, Ellis also charted the percentage of coverage the parties’ candidates got and here, he says, you see roughly 2:1 ratio favoring the blue line.

There’ll be more such reports coming from Ellis and Daylife and we’ll bring them to you here.