newspaper bot

What is newspaper?

Newspaper is a Python library designed for web scraping and content extraction, primarily focused on news articles and similar content. Developed by Lucas Ou-Yang, newspaper (also known as newspaper3k) functions as a web scraper that automatically extracts and parses content from websites. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string newspaper/0.2.8, making it easily recognizable to website administrators.

This open-source tool is available on GitHub with documentation that explains its capabilities. The library works by sending HTTP requests to target websites, downloading HTML content, and then using algorithms to extract meaningful information like article text, authors, publication dates, and images. Unlike more sophisticated AI crawlers, newspaper operates as a straightforward scraper without advanced intelligence capabilities.

Newspaper's behavior is typically straightforward—it makes requests to web pages, downloads their content, and processes it locally. It doesn't attempt to disguise itself as a browser, instead transparently identifying as a bot through its user-agent string.

Why is newspaper crawling my site?

Newspaper typically crawls websites to extract article content for various purposes. If you're seeing this crawler in your logs, someone is likely using the newspaper library to collect content from your site. This could be for research purposes, data analysis, content aggregation, or building a dataset for machine learning applications.

The frequency of visits depends entirely on how the person using the library has configured their scraping operation. Some might crawl your site once to extract specific articles, while others might set up recurring crawls to monitor for new content. The crawling is generally triggered by someone running a script that utilizes the newspaper library.

It's important to note that newspaper crawling is not officially authorized by most websites unless specifically permitted. The crawling represents individual users of the library accessing your content programmatically rather than an organized service.

What is the purpose of newspaper?

Newspaper exists to simplify the process of extracting structured content from news websites and blogs. Its primary function is to turn unstructured HTML web pages into clean, usable data by automatically identifying and extracting relevant components like headlines, article text, author information, and publication dates.

This tool supports various applications including research, content aggregation, data analysis, and training datasets for natural language processing. Developers and researchers use newspaper to build applications that need to process news content at scale without manual extraction.

Unlike search engine crawlers that provide direct benefits to websites through increased visibility, newspaper primarily benefits its users rather than the websites being crawled. Website owners should be aware that content extracted through newspaper might be repurposed in ways not originally intended, potentially without attribution.

How do I block newspaper?

If you prefer to prevent newspaper from accessing your content, you can implement restrictions through your robots.txt file. Newspaper is designed to respect standard robots.txt directives, though this depends on whether the person using the library has configured it to follow these rules.

To block newspaper specifically, add these lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: newspaper
Disallow: /

This instructs the newspaper crawler to avoid all content on your site. However, it's important to understand that robots.txt is essentially an honor system. While the newspaper library can be configured to respect these directives, users of the library might override this behavior or modify the user-agent string.

For more comprehensive protection, you might need to implement server-side detection and blocking of the newspaper user-agent string through your web server configuration or a web application firewall. This approach would actively prevent requests from the newspaper user-agent rather than simply requesting that it not crawl your site. Keep in mind that blocking newspaper might prevent legitimate research or archival efforts, so consider your specific situation before implementing restrictions.