Oaida Adrian

Posted on Jul 7 Edited on Oct 16 Originally published at apify.com

Building a Real-Time Press Release Monitor with Python and RSS...

#python #webscraping #automation #news

Building a Real-Time Press Release Monitor with Python and RSS Aggregation

Staying on top of company announcements is hard. Press releases are scattered across PRWeb, Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, and dozens of smaller wires. Each has its own RSS feed, and none of them offer keyword filtering out of the box.

I built a Press Release Monitor that aggregates all major PR wires into a single, searchable stream with keyword filtering and full-text extraction.

The Problem

PR professionals, journalists, and analysts need to track company announcements as they happen. But the current workflow is manual: visit each PR wire site, search for your keywords, copy results. Slow and error-prone.

The Solution: Multi-Source RSS Aggregation

The monitor pulls from multiple PR distribution feeds simultaneously:

PRWeb — broad press release distribution
Google News PR Search — catches releases picked up by news aggregators
Dow Jones MarketWatch — financial market announcements

PR_FEEDS = {
    "prweb_all": "https://www.prweb.com/rss2/daily.xml",
    "google_news_pr": "https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=press+release+announces",
    "dowjones_markets": "https://feeds.content.dowjones.io/public/rss/RSSMarketsMain",
}

Keyword Filtering

Once all releases are aggregated, the monitor applies keyword filters:

if keywords:
    text = f"{release['title']} {release['summary']}".lower()
    matching = [r for r in releases if any(kw.lower() in text for kw in keywords)]

This lets you track specific companies, products, or topics across all wires at once.

Full-Text Extraction

For deeper analysis, the monitor optionally visits each release page and extracts the full text using BeautifulSoup:

soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, "html.parser")
for tag in soup(["script", "style", "nav", "footer"]):
    tag.decompose()
full_text = soup.get_text(" ")[:5000]

Auto-Detected Company Names

A smart parser extracts the issuing company from each title using common PR naming conventions:

def extract_company(title):
    parts = title.split(":")
    if len(parts) >= 2:
        return parts[0].strip()  # "Company Name: Announces..."
    if " announces " in title.lower():
        return title[:title.lower().index(" announces ")].strip()

Try It

You can use the Press Release Monitor right now:

Apify Store: Press Release Monitor
GitHub: multi-tool-content-api

The Apify actor uses pay-per-event pricing at $0.01 per press release extracted.

Use Cases

Media Monitoring: Track mentions of your company across all PR wires
Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor announcements in real-time
Investment Research: Watch for market-moving press releases
Lead Generation: Find companies announcing funding, product launches, or expansion

Conclusion

By aggregating multiple RSS feeds with keyword filtering and full-text extraction, we turned scattered press releases into a single, searchable stream. The future of media monitoring is automated, real-time, and keyword-aware.

Built with Python, feedparser, BeautifulSoup4, httpx, and the Apify platform.

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