A story published in one city can appear on a trading desk, a trade website, and a company intranet within seconds. Nobody retyped it. A syndication service carried it there, and the steps it took explain most of what makes a news feed good or bad.
Ingestion: accept whatever the publisher sends
Publishers do not agree on formats. One sends XML by secure transfer, another posts to a web address, a third exposes a feed that has to be polled. A syndication service meets each publisher where it already is, because asking a newsroom to change its systems is the fastest way to lose the source.
Good ingestion also notices silence. If a wire that normally sends forty stories an hour goes quiet, someone should know before a customer asks.
Normalization: one structure for every story
Each incoming story is converted to a single internal structure: headline, body, byline, timestamps, language, source, and any media. Character encoding problems are fixed here, and so are the small differences in how publishers mark paragraphs, tables, and corrections.
Recipients see the benefit directly. They integrate one format once, however many sources they take.
Tagging: say what the story is about
The service then attaches subjects, industries, places, and companies. This is the step that lets a recipient ask for a slice of the feed by meaning, not just by keyword. It has to happen in the moment, because tagging that takes minutes turns a real-time feed into a delayed one.
Entitlements: who may receive what
Licences differ. A publisher may allow its stories to go to financial terminals but not to public websites, or to one country but not another. The entitlement layer applies those rules to every story for every recipient. It is unglamorous and it is where the legal risk sits, so it deserves as much testing as the delivery code.
Delivery: many destinations at once
Finally the story goes out, by whichever method each recipient chose. The service should deliver to all of them at the same moment, confirm what arrived, and resend what did not.
- Ask a provider how it detects a silent source.
- Ask how corrections and withdrawals are delivered.
- Ask what happens to stories sent while your connection is down.
