newspaper bot

The newspaper bot user-agent is associated with the 'newspaper' Python library, an open-source tool for web scraping and content extraction from news articles and blogs. It is not a bot from a single company but a tool that can be deployed by anyone. It functions by downloading the HTML of a webpage and using algorithms to extract meaningful information like article text, authors, and publication dates. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string newspaper/0.2.8.

The newspaper bot is crawling your website because someone is using the 'newspaper' library to collect your content. The purpose could be anything from academic research and data analysis to content aggregation for a machine learning dataset. The frequency of visits is determined entirely by how the person using the library has configured their scraping operation. It is important to note that this crawling is not from an official service and may be unauthorized.

The purpose of the 'newspaper' library is to simplify the process of extracting structured content from news websites. It supports various applications, including research, content aggregation, and the creation of training datasets for natural language processing. Unlike search engine crawlers that can provide a direct benefit to websites through increased visibility, this tool primarily benefits its users. Website owners should be aware that content extracted with this tool may be repurposed in ways not originally intended.

To prevent the 'newspaper' library from being used to scrape your site, you can add a disallow rule for its user-agent in your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing access for web scrapers that identify themselves.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block this bot:

User-agent: newspaper
Disallow: /