Building a Media Monitoring Tool: Mentions Across News Sites

Media monitoring, tracking brand mentions, competitor coverage, and industry news, is a service companies pay thousands for monthly. Here's how to build your own with Python and web scraping. What We'll Build A tool that: Monitors multiple news sources for keyword mentions Extracts article metadata (title, date, author, snippet) Deduplicates across sources Sends alerts for new mentions Setup pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas feedparser newspaper3k RSS Feed Monitor The fastest approach starts with RSS feeds, as many news sites still publish them: import feedparser from datetime import datetime class RSSMonitor: def __init__(self, keywords): self.keywords = [k.lower() for k in keywords] self.seen_urls = set() def check_feed(self, feed_url, source_name): """Check an RSS feed for keyword mentions.""" feed = feedparser.parse(feed_url) mentions = [] for entry in feed.entries: title = entry.get("title", "") summary = entry.get("summary", "") link = entry.get("link", "") if link in se