Content Feeds

The content feeds provide access to the Reuters multimedia content, which includes multimedia articles, stories, videos and pictures, through standard feed formats such as atom, rss, mediarss and json. There is also an option to receive the content automatically annotated with rich semantic metadata from the Reuters Open Calais service. What follows is a guide to accessing Reuters content feeds programmatically.

Feed Requests

Feeds are provided via URLs and both the structure and parameters will determine the content and feed format returned. The base URL for requesting a feed is:

http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/feed

Feed Parameters

Following the base URL there are a number of parameters which will determine the content and format of the feed. There are five set parameters which are required to return a feed of Reuters content, these are:

edition (required) - The Edition represents the country web site that the Reuters content is sourced from e.g US, UK, Japan, India, China etc.

content (required) - The Content Type represents the type of content that will be contained in the feed e.g. Articles, News Text, Videos, Pictures etc.

channel (required for content) - The Channel represents the news channel content which the feed will contain e.g. Top News, Entertainment, Business. The channel parameter can be either a channel name or number depending on the content type. If the channel is omitted a feed of feeds is returned, in OPML, which will represent all the feeds available for the given Content Type, Edition and Format.

format (required) - The format of the feed e.g. Atom, RSS, Media RSS, JSON etc.

apikey (required) - Your unique API Key that is required with every request.

As well as the five (four for an OPML feed) set of required parameters there are a number of additional optional parameters for tailoring your feed, they are:

version - (recommended) The version of the API feed. There is currently only one version (version 1.0) of the feeds, buit over time this is likely to change. Therefore it is recommended that the version parameter is included to safeguard you application against changes in the feeds. Not including this parameter will always return the latest version of the of the API feeds.

count (optional) - The number of entries (items in RSS) a feed will contain. Omitting this parameter returns the default 10 entries per feed and the maximum allow count is 100.

callback (optional) - The callback parameter allows you to specify the name of the callback function which the returning Json feed is enclosed - this parameter is only used for JSON feeds. The default callback function for Json is handleReutersJson(...)

semantic (optional) - Provides a semantically marked version of the content in an RDF format. This uses the Reuters Open Calais service to automatically extract entities from within the content and give meaning and relationships in the form of metadata to the content. Currently values include: calaisrdf, calaissimple or calaismicro

How to Request

Four of the five required parameters used to request a feed can take two forms in the requesting URL: a URL path parameter structure or a URL query string parameter structure.

Path Parameter format:

http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/feed/[edition]/[content]/[channel]/[format]?apikey=[key]

Example:

http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/feed/us/channelarticles/topnews/atom?apikey=[key]

Query String Parameter format:

http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/feed?content=[content]&edition=[edition]&channel=[channel]&format=[format]&apikey=[key]

Example:

http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/feed?content=channelarticles&edition=us&channel=topnews&format=atom&apikey=yourkey