How News Aggregation Works — And Why the Source Matters

For those wanting to catch up on the news in the morning, opening twenty pages of newspapers one by one is rarely an option. News aggregators handle this task: they collect headlines from many sources and categorize them by topics. But what happens technically during this process, and where do the boundaries lie?

The basis for this process is known as feeds. Almost every news site offers machine-readable directories of their latest articles, mostly in RSS or Atom formats. An aggregator regularly fetches these feeds, extracts the headline, a brief description, the publication time, and the link to the original piece, and sorts the news into its categories.

When multiple editorial teams report on the same event, duplicates may occur. Good aggregators identify such cases through similarity comparisons of headlines and web addresses and group them into thematic bundles. Importantly, no news piece disappears — the diversity of sources remains visible; it’s just the presentation that becomes more organized.

Legally, Germany and Europe have the Press Publishers' Rights Act. This allows aggregators to use only "individual words or very short excerpts" from a press article. Credible offerings, therefore, display concise summaries, clearly indicate the source, and link directly to the original piece — as the article should be read where it was created.

This transparency is a key indicator of quality: a reliable aggregator makes the origin of every piece of news clear, does not mix external reporting with its own texts, and guides readers to the source with a click. In contrast, those who completely copy external articles or hide the source do not serve the interests of either the audience or the publishers.