Getting Started with News Scraping: Everything You Need to Know
What is news scraping?
News scraping is a subset of web scraping that mainly targets public online media websites. It refers to automatically extracting news updates and releases from news articles and websites. It also relates to extracting public news data from the news results tab on SERPs or dedicated news aggregator platforms.
On the other hand, web scraping or web data extraction is the automatic retrieval of data from any website.
From a business point of view, news websites contain plenty of crucial public data, from reviews about newly released products to coverage of a company’s financial results and other vital announcements. These websites also cover several topics and industries, including technology, finance, fashion, science, health, politics, and more.
Benefits of news scraping
The benefits of news scraping include:
- Risk identification and mitigation
- Source of up-to-date, reliable, and verified information
- Improves operations
- Improves compliance
How to scrape news data?
When it comes to public news scraping, Python offers one of the easiest ways to get started, especially given that it is an object-oriented language. Basically, scraping public news data involves two steps — downloading the webpage and parsing the HTML.
Is it legal to scrape news websites?
Web scraping is one of the least time-consuming methods to access large amounts of the latest public news articles and monitor multiple news websites. In fact, with the increased sophistication of article scrapers, it has become increasingly possible to bypass anti-scraping measures that websites put in place to stop web scraping efforts.
However, the unmatched convenience of news scraping, or web scraping in general, doesn’t negate the existence of a few legal questions regarding the practice. So, is it legal to scrape news websites or is web scraping legal?
Well, as our legal team would say, it depends. Web scraping isn’t illegal as such, but it totally depends on the intention behind the practice. As long as web scraping news websites doesn’t violate any laws or infringe any intellectual property rights, regarding the data you intend to scrape or the source target, it should be considered a legal activity.
Accordingly, before engaging in any scraping activities, you should get appropriate professional legal advice regarding your specific situation.
Conclusion
Web scraping news websites provide a convenient and fast route for extracting real-time, reliable, and accurate data about competitors, the weather, the economic environment, and more.
To create tools that scrape news articles, Python is an ideal programming language that provides this capability, on top of multiple other benefits such as its extensive libraries and more.
And with news scraping being legal and ethical when used appropriately and for the right purpose, companies can enjoy the benefits of this noble practice, all the while using it to monitor their reputation, gather competitive intelligence, unearth fresh ideas, and more.
The credit of the Blogs: Oxylabs
