And yes, that sounds even more indulgent and navel-gazing than most media about media. There’s a logic here, though: Twitter is great because it’s immediate and unfiltered (when it’s working). But there’s a value in a service that pauses and sifts, too.

In this case, that work is done by Steve McGookin, a veteran of the Financial Times (and Forbes, for a minute or two, where I worked with him), who sorts through journalists’ tweets and lets you know what they’re talking about and what they’re saying.

Straightforward stuff, but it’s something that isn’t being done yet. Most aggregators either rely on crowdsourcing/algorithms to cull stories, which is interesting but crude, or they don’t do any sorting at all. And because McGookin is doing actual editorial work, via super-concise summaries, it’s much more useful than the “bunch of tweets = a newspaper” model that paper.li is pushing. (No annoying spam, either.)

Muck Rack Daily is a spinoff of Muckrack, one of the umpteenth Twitter-related sites generated by the guys at Sawhorse Media. Sawhorse co-founder Gregory Galant says the main Muckrack site, which simply tracks individual journalists’ Twitter acccounts, is generating 100,000 uniques a month. But this new site may ultimately be much more useful, and popular.

Most obvious example: CNN’s decision to cede much of its airtime to a stunt involving Larry King and Ashton Kutcher, who are having some kind of follower contest, which you can read about somewhere else.

But no need to single out the Time Warner (TWX) unit–every big news outlet now features stories about Twitter, presented by anchors/reporters who use Twitter. Which makes sense, because while Twitter may not be for everyone, it definitely appeals to professional self-promoters. [UPDATE: Add Oprah Winfrey to the ranks.]

If you tried to put a price tag on that kind of coverage… well, it’d be very expensive. Just advertising a Web service on TV doesn’t ensure success–ask IAC’s (IACI) Ask.com (or Pets.com, for that matter). But it can certainly get people to sample the service. So that’s some of what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, if you want to see the press embrace Twitter in real-time, there’s now a service that will let you do just that. Meet Muck Rack, which does nothing but aggregate Tweets from media members (um, like me).

The site comes to us from Sawhorse Media, a Brooklyn company that is trying to make a business out of Twitter-related sites and stunts–they’re the dudes who brought us the Shorty Awards earlier this year, as well as Musebin, a collection of Twitter-sized music reviews.

Sawhorse CEO Greg Galant tells me this one took a week to build, which is good, because the conceit is wafer-thin.

But it’s also a pretty good one–like the late, lamented “March Tweetness” promotion, there’s definitely something to sorting and curating the flood of Tweets. I also like the fact that Muck Rack offers a “links” view  that highlights the full headline of stories that media folks inevitably promote via their Tweets. Very helpful. You could definitely extract a few ad dollars out of this one, if you were so inclined.

Or you could just use it as an excuse to write about Twitter, again.