Media Watch, a St. Louis-based news tracking service, released its rankings of the top 10 most covered local news stories in the St. Louis-metro area for 2007, as measured by the number and length of television and radio broadcasts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Shawn Hornbeck/Ben Ownby saga was the most covered news story of 2007, with 3,381 local broadcast stories totaling 61 hours of media coverage. Placing a distant second was the I-64/40 highway closure, with 2,377 broadcasts and 42 hours of coverage.

More relevant to us, however, is that coverage of the troubles in St. Louis city public schools and the state’s subsequent takeover of the district ranked as the fourth most-covered story in 2007.

And, of course — lest we forget — coverage of the Show-Me Institute’s blog came in at a competitive 500,000,000th place in 2007.