Sky News Data: One ID for Stories, Live Blogs and Video
A Sky News scraper has to start from how news.sky.com numbers things. Sky News, the UK's first 24-hour news channel, on air since 5 February 1989 and an editorially independent part of Sky UK, puts Sky News stories, live blogs, videos and podcast episodes on one numeric ID sequence, placed at the end of every address. The words in front of the ID are decoration: a rewritten headline brings a new slug, the old one keeps working, and the ID stays the only reliable key. Each record therefore carries the ID and the page type - article, live blog, video or podcast.
The fronts follow the desks: UK, Politics, World, US, Money, Science, Climate & Tech and Ents & Arts, plus Analysis, Data x Forensics, Offbeat, Programmes, Videos and Weather. Older names survive underneath. /business now lands on Money, /technology and /climate both land on Science, Climate & Tech, and climate clips keep a desk tag of their own. The Sky News Data and Forensics unit adds interactive pieces, such as a postcode lookup for council tax rises, next to its analysis.
Below the fronts sit topic pages at /topic/{name}-{id}, paged /2, /3 and on. The number picks the topic, not the name, a page past the end loads empty rather than failing, and the lists run back years: the Live topic reaches May 2018. For any backfill, topic pages are the spine.
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