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Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

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Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#11

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

I’m sure this is not an original comment, but it’s interesting to see what you’ve classified as left/right. It must be difficult given that there is not really one axis of left/right and that “the centre” is highly relative. To me, seeing the BBC and Euronews in the “left” section is pretty funny, but I guess it’s true relative to US politics.

Is there anything you’ve learned about “the left media” and “the right media” from doing this? Do you think your sources are equidistant from “the centre”?

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#12

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

I like it. I would like to know how you did it!

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#14

Hi looks interesting and useful! What's the differences between newscatcher (python) vs. newscatcherapi.com? Is there any limit on using newscatcher (python) as shown in the pricing pages? Also, I was looking at https://newsapi.org . How does your python API compare? I see that in newsapi, it also get old articles; do you implement similar features?

Also, newscatcherapi.com has a real suppport for 10 languages. And yeah, we are like 10 times cheaper

Disclaimer: I am a co-founder

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#18

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

Seems like a terrible idea to me. The two sides are at war, and if the way you sample them is by going 50-50, that encourages them to be more extreme because that will skew the average in their direction.

We already see this in the media. You have the host and two people. Lets hear what person A says, lets hear what person B says. Who's right? Impossible to tell, otherwise you must be biased. And no mention that person A drew conclusions on claims which were mostly verifiable facts, whereas person B drew conclusions on entirely made up claims.

In fact, this is a known fallacy and has a name: argument to moderation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Some times person A is 100% right and person B is 0% right. The thing is that to be able to tell the different takes effort in educating yourself. And the minute you try to outsource this to someone else, they will use that trust against you. But calling it 50-50 is not a solution, it's not even an approximate solution.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#19
How complete are the articles that are returned? Last time I looked into RSS news feeds a lot of sources would just put abbreviated / teaser content in and then try to get you to click through to the story on their site. That obviously didn't make for the best experience with an RSS downloader though.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#20
This doesn't "collect" anything, it's just a python package wrapped on top of a sqlite database. If you choose an arbitrary website that doesn't have information in said database you just get "website not supported". There's not even any logic to guess a website's RSS feed URL... And in the end it's just an RSS feed reader?
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