news-watch: Indonesia's top news websites scraper

news-watch is a Python package that scrapes structured news data from Indonesia's top news websites, offering keyword and date filtering queries for targeted research.

Ethical Considerations & Disclaimer

Purpose: For educational and research purposes only. Not designed for commercial use that could be detrimental to news source providers.

User responsibility: Comply with each website's Terms of Service and robots.txt. Aggressive scraping may lead to IP blocking. Scrape responsibly and respect server limitations.

Installation

Using pip

pip install news-watch
playwright install chromium

Development setup: see https://okky.dev/news-watch/getting-started/

Performance Notes

⚠️ Works best locally. Cloud environments (Google Colab, servers) may experience degraded performance or blocking due to anti-bot measures.

Some scrapers may work on a local machine but fail on remote servers, Linux CI, or GitHub Actions. This usually happens because of anti-bot protection, rate limits, geolocation differences, JavaScript rendering differences, or sudden source-side changes.

Using a proxy

When running on a server or behind anti-bot blocks, route requests through a residential/datacenter proxy. The proxy applies to every layer (aiohttp, rnet, and the Playwright fallback):

# via flag
newswatch -k ihsg -sd 2025-01-01 --proxy "http://proxy.example.com:8080"

# via env (also honors standard HTTPS_PROXY / HTTP_PROXY)
export NEWSWATCH_PROXY="socks5://proxy.example.com:1080"
newswatch -k ihsg -sd 2025-01-01

import newswatch as nw
df = nw.scrape_to_dataframe(
    "ihsg",
    "2025-01-01",
    proxy="http://proxy.example.com:8080",
)

Other reliability overrides (env vars): NEWSWATCH_USER_AGENT (custom User-Agent), NEWSWATCH_MAX_RETRIES (retry count, default 3), NEWSWATCH_TIMEZONE (zone for publish_date and date filters, default Asia/Jakarta).

Usage

To run the scraper from the command line:

newswatch --method <search|latest> -k <keywords> -sd <start_date> -s [<scrapers>] -of <output_format> -v

Command-Line Arguments

Examples

# Basic usage
newswatch --keywords ihsg --start_date 2025-01-01

# Latest monitoring mode
newswatch --method latest --scrapers "antaranews,kompas,viva"

# Multiple keywords with specific scraper
newswatch -k "ihsg,bank" -s "tempo" --output_format xlsx -v

# List available scrapers
newswatch --list_scrapers

Python API Usage

import newswatch as nw

# Basic scraping - returns list of article dictionaries
articles = nw.scrape("ekonomi,politik", "2025-01-01")
print(f"Found {len(articles)} articles")

# Get results as pandas DataFrame for analysis
df = nw.scrape_to_dataframe("teknologi,startup", "2025-01-01")
print(df['source'].value_counts())

# Latest monitoring
latest = nw.latest_to_dataframe(scrapers="antaranews,kompas,viva")
print(latest[["source", "title"]].head())

# Save directly to file
nw.scrape_to_file(
    keywords="bank,ihsg", 
    start_date="2025-01-01",
    output_path="financial_news.xlsx"
)

# Quick recent news
recent_news = nw.quick_scrape("politik", days_back=3)

# Get available news sources
sources = nw.list_scrapers()
print("Available sources:", sources)

See the practical guide for end-to-end CLI and Python-API examples and common research patterns. For interactive examples, see the API reference notebook.

Run on Google Colab

You can run news-watch on Google Colab

Output

The scraped articles are saved as a CSV, XLSX, JSON, or JSONL file in the current working directory with the format news-watch-{keywords}-YYYYMMDD_HH.

Each record has 8 fields: title, publish_date, author, content, keyword, category, source, link. (scrape_timestamp exists on the internal Article model but is not emitted to output.)

The output file contains the following columns:

• title
• publish_date
• author
• content
• keyword
• category
• source
• link

Retrieval Methods

• search is the default and keeps the current keyword/date research workflow.
• latest is intended for latest-news monitoring and does not require keywords.

Supported Websites (82)

ABC News, Alinea.id, Al Jazeera, Antara News, AP News, Bali Post, Banten News, BBC News, Berita Jatim, BeritaSatu, Betahita, Bisnis.com, Bloomberg Technoz, CNA Indonesia, CNBC Indonesia, CNN Indonesia, The Conversation Indonesia, DailySocial, Dandapala, DDTC News, Detik, Fajar, Galamedia, Gatra, Good News From Indonesia, Grid, Harian Jogja, Hipwee, Hukumonline, IDN Financials, IDN Times, IDX Channel, Independen.id, Indopolitika, iNews, Infobanknews, Investor.id, Jakarta Globe, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Selaras, Jawa Pos, JPNN (Jawa Pos News Network), Kaltim Post (Borneo24), Katadata, KBR, Kompas, Kontan, Kumparan, Liputan6, Media Indonesia, Merdeka, MetroTV News, Mojok, Mongabay Indonesia, NBC News, Niaga.Asia, NTVNews.id, NusaBali, Okezone, Pantau.com, Pikiran Rakyat, Poskota, Project Multatuli, Harian Rakyat Aceh, Republika, RM.ID (Rakyat Merdeka), RMOL, RRI (RRI.co.id), SINDOnews, Suara, Suara Merdeka, Surabaya Pagi, SWA, Tempo, Tirto, Tribunnews, TVOne, TVRI News, Viva, VOA Indonesia, VOI.id, Warta Ekonomi

Notes:

• 82 registered sources: 77 with keyword search, 82 with latest mode.
• 80 stable scrapers in the current release: 75 with keyword search, 80 with latest mode.
• 1 source under investigation; 1 source quarantined.
• AP News uses topic hub pages with keyword-in-title filtering (robots disallows /search?q=*).
• Al Jazeera is latest-only via RSS feed (search page is JS-rendered).
• Reuters skipped (WAF blocked).
• Use -s all to force-run all scrapers (may cause errors/timeouts).
• Some sources are environment-sensitive and may fail on remote servers even if they work locally.
• Limitation: Kontan scraper maximum 50 pages.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Open an issue or pull request to add a source or improve an existing one.

Keep tests with their owning behavior: shared scraper contracts in tests/test_basescraper.py, registry metadata and discovery in tests/test_registry.py, and source-specific parsing and extraction in tests/test_scrapers_focused.py. Do not add catch-all files such as tests/test_new_scrapers.py. Before adding coverage, search the owning module and extend or parameterize an existing test when it already exercises the same observable behavior. Keep another case only for a distinct boundary, precedence rule, transition, or real error path; avoid assertions on source text, private plumbing, or registry counts.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details. The authors assume no liability for misuse of this software.

Citation

@software{mabruri_newswatch,
  author = {Okky Mabruri},
  title = {news-watch},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.14908389}
}

Related Work

• indonesia-news-scraper
• news-scraper