Newsobjects

A "piece of news" is called a newsobject.
This could be for example an article in a newspaper, a certain radio episode, a tweet, an article on a blog etc etc.

Newsobject types

The BelgaPress platform considers 3 types of newsobjects:

NEWS

CLIPPING

DOCUMENT

The NEWS newsobjects are the most common. They represent the actual news items as provided by Belga and all of its aggregated news sources.

The other 2 are user generated content, and thus specific to the user's tenant (a user from organisation X cannot see any Clippings of organisation Y). They can be created within the BelgaPress platform.

CLIPPING newsobjects are smaller pieces of existing NEWS newsobjects, isolated by the user (this includes audio and video snippets, and even cutouts from publication pages).

DOCUMENT newsobjects are a newsobject form representation of files and their metadata, added by the user in the Documents section of the platform. They are typically used for included content from sources not provided by Belga.

Fetching newsobjects

Belga offers a fast and easy way of retrieving newsobjects over the REST API.

No caching allowed
It is forbidden to cache newsobjects. As stated above, Belga is legally bound to be aware of every individual read per customer, for monitoring, billing and analytical purpose.

Step 1: `GET /newsobjects`

The integrator has to fetch a list of newsobjects via given criteria.
Belgapress will return a list of uuids, together with title, lead, logo and metadata. This allows the integrator to show a list of newsobjects in a visually attractive way to the user.

Step 2: `GET /newsobjects/{uuid}`

Any time an end-user wants to read (or watch/listen in case of RTV) a certain newsobject, the integrator has to fetch this from the Belgapress API.

Newsobject access control

Every user is provided access to a certain number of sources of newsobjects.
This depends on their organisation, department or user level permissions.

For every source there are 3 possibilities:

INCLUDED: source is included in the subscription

PURCHASABLE: source is included in postpaid package, so newsobjects in these sources can be purchased per piece (after purchase the newsobject status changes to PURCHASED)

EXCLUDED: user cannot access (nor even see) the newsobjects

QUOTA_EXCEEDED: only partial body of the newsobject is returned, because a user with role VISITOR exceeded their newsobject consumption limits

All newsobjects marked as PURCHASABLE are shown as a teaser plus paywall. Some properties change:

attachments with type Attachment do not contain references to prevent downloading

attachments with type Image only contain

About Newsobjects

Newsobjects#

Newsobject types#

Fetching newsobjects#

No caching allowed#

Step 1: GET /newsobjects#

Step 2: GET /newsobjects/{uuid}#