Many businesses in the UK monitor or aggregate newspaper website content by crawling and scraping the newspaper sites, building a database of content,  then providing either website links or copies of articles to clients. 

The NLA has launched eClips Web - a database of publisher controlled website content, based on direct feeds from the newspaper web CMS (Content Management Systems). eClips Web allows media monitoring organisations and news aggregators to offer an improved service to clients with more accurate article metadata and classification, reliable coverage, and faster delivery.

eClips Web uses

eClips Web feeds are used by media monitoring companies and their end user clients as an alternative to scraping.

Businesses can track what is being written about their company brand, products or services on multiple newspaper websites simultaneously and in near to real-time, from a fully managed and licensed web feed. 

eClips Web allows businesses to monitor sites such as The Times and The Sun which cannot be scraped due to licence restrictions, login or paywalls.

eClips Web process

1. The NLA receives a real-time XML and image feed of web articles from the publisher CMS.
2. Each feed is standardised into a single NewsMLG2 format with consistent and accurate tagging of dates, headlines, sluglines, sections, author, byline, and copyright.
3. The NLA adds the NewsML to a central database where it is indexed for searching and available for download via the eClips Web API.
4. Media monitoring organisations supply direct links or archived copies of eClips Web articles to end-users so that businesses can review coverage even if the article has moved, modified, or is behind a login or paywall.

eClips Web features

eClips Web offers a number of advantages for businesses monitoring editorial content published on national and regional newspaper websites:

• Delivery of articles on average within 10 mins of publication on the website.
• Full-text of all articles and versions in XML based on the NewsML standard.
• An arhcived PDF / HTML copy of the article as it was published.
• Searchable API and option to retrieve content real-time or by date range.
• Rights and libel restrictions and publisher corrections to all article versions.  
• Links to the source website or any archived version of the article.

Find out more - Samples of the eCW newspaper feed.

Contacts

If you are a media relations manager at an end user organisation, contact your media monitoring or press cuttings agency today to ask about eClips Web content.  
If you are a media monitoring organisation and have any general questions on licences or eClips Web please call client services on 0207 332 9380 or email clientservices@nla.co.uk