The internet has made news updates easier than ever through mobile apps, browser-based feeds, desktop feeds, etc. Organizations use this easy access to news to analyze the market, grab any first-mover benefit to product/service trends, and more. Whether you run an agency to aid businesses with news scraper service or your company does that, you need automated web apps for the job. Otherwise, it would be a daunting task to analyze all popular news outlets. Continue reading to learn everything you need to know about news scraping. Also, find the ultimate list of popular news scraper tools your agency or business can rely on.
What Is News Scraping?
Automatic extraction of data from the web is scraping. When you specifically collect data related to public news, that is news scraping. News scraping is a subcategory of web scraping. The scraping algorithm only looks up content like press releases, media kits, press notes, news articles, journalistic reports, interviews, product reviews, product launches, etc. When you search for a specific industry keyword, like on-demand video platforms, and scrape news data from SERP news results tabs, aggregating news platforms, etc., that is known as news scraping. Automatic extraction of news data is ethical and allowed since you only access content available in the public domain. However, you may not want to copy those content and publish it on your website as your content. That would be copyright infringement. You are free to analyze the collected data in any way you want to get actionable business or market insights.
Benefits of News Scraping
#1. Up-To-Date Business Insights
You can utilize news scraper tools to scrape public news on the web to stay updated about the industry in which your business operates. News scraper will keep feeding updated news every second so that you do not miss any ad hoc changes in the industry.
#2. Identifying Risks and Avoiding Damage to the Reputation
Know any upcoming weather conditions, political changes, government impositions, and more instantly by extracting public news from news aggregator sites. Knowing the upcoming issues beforehand gives you more time to plan a strategy to address the problem.
#3. Better Compliance
Whenever there are any drastic compliance changes in your industry, you know that first through a press release or note. You must scrape data from news portals to grab that data faster than your competitor and plan future compliances.
#4. Verified News
News scraping empowers you not to make any business decisions from the influence of fake or fraudulent news. There are many fact-checking sites that cross-verify viral news articles.
#5. Knowing the Coverages of Your Company
To know your audience engagements, you must follow coverages by consumers, influencers, bloggers, and online magazines. Such coverage about your business usually shows up on news portals or aggregating news platforms. Hence, news scraping helps you gauge your public image.
#6. Discovering Trends
You can use news scraping to explore trending products and services. Then, you can modify your offerings accordingly to the benefits of the trend.
#7. Getting Content Ideas
If you are a content-focused business, you can get fresh content ideas by scraping online news portals. Also, you can source good quality content references to produce unique and engaging content on products and services.
Essential Features of News Scraper Tools
A news scraper tool is the main engine that keeps feeding your business analysts with outstanding and real-time data. It must contain the following features so that your news scraping project can generate fruitful data:
#1. Scalability and Flexibility
The news scrapper tool should let you choose a scalable plan to scale up or down according to your business needs. It will help you save money. Also, the tool should be flexible to allow the collection of unique news data that other companies in the same industry may not be collecting.
#2. Organized Data
The tool must deliver organized public news data directly to your email inbox. It should not make you invest time in getting real-time scraped data.
#3. News Scrapin Recipes
There should be read-to-use templates for news scraping for many industries. Hence, you can select your industry and pick a template to run a data scraping project.
#4. API Access
The news scraper tool should also provide an application programming interface (API) so that agencies can develop customized news scraping solutions for their clients.
#5. Diverse Data Scraping
The tool should enable you to scrape public news from a variety of content sources like the followings:
From news headlines Filter content by reporter or news portal Filter content by region, country, locale, ethnicity, etc. Scrape news from audio, podcasts, videos, slideshow, etc. Filter news content by upload date, time, month, year, etc.
You will find all the above features in the news scraper tools outlined in the later sections of this article.
How News Scraper Tools Can Help You
For Agencies
Get API tools for news scraping to develop a web app, mobile app, or PC software with agency branding. Obtain organized and structured scraped data for different clients directly to a dedicated dashboard or email inbox. Get a custom quote on news scraping services with a predefined service agreement, like high-quality data, real-time scraping, all popular media outlet coverage, etc., in one package. Train your news scraping team so that they can run scraping recipes themselves. It lets you focus on business marketing and client acquisition while the tool takes care of the technical stuff.
For Businesses
Get read-to-analyze public news and online media monitoring data without running news scraping projects Personalized dashboards for multiple news keyword management Affordable news scraping packages for the amount of data you need to explore Customizable news scraping sources like select news portals, US states, regions, global countries, etc. Any business can use these tools since these are no-code apps with a minimum learning curve. You do not need to be a news scraping expert.
Now, let us learn about the best news scraper tools that experts use to experience great success in online news data scraping.
Bright Data
Bright Data News Scrapper is useful for collecting all the news data you need. It is capable of scraping various news websites and newsfeeds to serve you with crucial information such as headlines, sports updates, interviews, and breaking news from worldwide. Using this solution, data scraping becomes effortless as it does not need you to write codes. It is even useful in case of change in the news website site map. In the case of site structure modification, the tool will also modify the crawler code. This scalable app can cater to your ever-growing needs by collecting data for you at a rapid speed using proprietary website site unlocking technology. Moreover, it complies with all the major data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Whether you want to collect news for your research work, determine trending topics, the number of news pieces a website publishes daily, or customize your content based on topics your competitors focus on — Bright Data is here for you.
Oxylabs
Are you looking for an API that will seamlessly collect data for you? If yes, check out Oxylabs Web Scraper API. It offers you a maintenance-free web-scraping infrastructure for delivering the desired results. With its assistance, one can extract data hassle-free, even from the most complex websites. The API has smart features such as JavaScript rendering and a built-in patented proxy rotator. These ensure fast and dependable data extraction. As you start using this API, you will come across a less number of CAPTCHAs and IP blocks while receiving accurate data on time. Effortless geo-restriction bypass is another cool feature of Oxylabs API. No matter where you are located, it allows you to access localized search results from 195 countries. This API frees you from the need to develop or maintain your scrapers. You can start using this API without worrying about challenges such as IP blocks and JavaScript-heavy websites. For any unsuccessful scraping attempts, it automatically retries to gather data. Its integration process is also easy — for any help, check out the official documentation. Oxylabs also supports bulk scraping, where you can scrape up to 1000 URLs per batch. The scheduler of this API lets you schedule recurring scraping tasks.
DataOx
DataOx is one of the top news scraping service providers that can collect and present structured and cleansed news on any topic. Its web crawler regularly visits news websites and social media to collect news articles. You can also avail of services like information categorization and tailored analytics from it. Whether you want to monitor and protect your media reputation, acquire intelligence on your competitors, create a communication strategy, or understand industry trends, this is the tool you should use.
Zyte
News extraction plays a crucial role in gathering insights and analyzing products, brand popularity, trending topics, and keywords. Using Zyte news API, you can collect a large amount of data that is of the highest quality. It utilizes AI-powered data extraction method to automatically collect all important fields on a piece of news, such as headline, body text, images, author name, and publication date. This is an on-demand web data extraction solution. Evolving with user needs, Zyte API offers a large number of metadata types and delivers the output data directly to your AWS S3 bucket. To try it out, you can sign up here.
SmartScrapers
SmartScrapers is a reliable tool for news monitoring. You can use it for scraping news data from the web. It utilizes advanced web scraping technologies to gather data on products, companies, industries, etc. Use it to collect all types of data – local news, news cycle, visualizations, infographics, world data, trends, or anything else. This solution lets you monitor and evaluate recent events or get insights on global trends. SmartScrapers provides you with reliable and accurate data from websites, blogs, news sites, social platforms, review sites, and various other sources. The collected data is precise and available quickly, saving your valuable time. You can depend on this full-service provider tool for unique, updated, customized data that suits your needs. It lets you monitor all public information by offering you structured data for live analysis of the data feeds. Thanks to its deepest news coverage, you can be assured of not missing a single piece of news. Moreover, every piece of news and information it collects includes detailed data that contributes to higher online site ranking.
ParseHub
While there are many news scraper tools available, not many of them are available for free. However, those looking for a free tool to collect news should go for the easy-to-use web scraper ParseHub. This powerful scraping tool allows you to extract your required data readily. Even if you want to gather data from a complex website, this tool can collect data from any JavaScript and AJAX webpage and store them for you. In addition to these, it offers the following features:
IP rotation to avoid geo-restrictions Scheduled collection of daily, weekly, and monthly data APIs and webhooks to use the data anywhere Download data in JSON and Excel formats for analysis
You can even ask this solution to scrape data from forms, open drop-downs, maps, and websites with unlimited tabs, pages, and pop-ups. Quick data extraction is also possible with ParseHub as it needs no coding and uses ML technology to screen the pages for necessary elements.
Final Words
So far, you have discovered some outstanding news scraper tools that can automatically help you explore public news on the web. You can explore all the tools with a few trial projects and choose the one that best suits your agency or business needs. The above list covers both web apps and APIs. If you are an agency, you can use APIs to offer news scraping services with your company-branded interface. This will require coding and API calling knowledge. Otherwise, you can use web apps that provide all the necessary interfaces. Web apps do not require any prior coding knowledge. You may also be interested in these popular web scraping tools.
