Back in February MIT'S Center for Civic Media published a stunning series of graphics tracing press coverage of Trayvon Martin's slaying, from a handful of Tweets to the most-covered story about race in the last five years. It wasn't the first time researchers from the Center have traced a story to its roots using data from Media Cloud, a toolset that collects stories from more than 27,000 media outlets, and which the Center developed along with colleagues from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Until recently, such insights have been limited to the small set of researchers with access to the database, along with the requisite data-mining skills. Here, Fitts features some tools that make researcher's data public and accessible.