I'm sorry. I wasn't precise enough. I meant that this corporation didn't offer news feeds in RSS format of their own news articles from their websites. They said their technology department had not yet implemented it in their set of Java tools and that it might be a while, given that they had other priorities. I suggested that XML::RSS -- run by them to scrape their content right off their web pages to convert to RSS -- could get the job done right now. I didn't see any downsides, but they said their techs "cringe" every time they hear the word "scraping." I don't understand why. What are the technical downsides to using Perl's RSS tools?
I don't know a particular reason why the term "scraping" might be looked down upon (other than the literal semantics). Data scraping has a long history of usefulness. Sometimes it's the quickest (if not the only) way to get data out of one system and into another.
Try using different terminology. Instead of "scraping", speak in terms of "parsing and extracting data". If you're talking to suits (rather than dealing directly with techs), try adding a few other terms like "business" and "customer", to lure them into their comfort zone: "parsing and extracting business data for customer repurposing" would probably be a good start.
You might try to find out if their Java folks are dealing with XML data to start with. If so, you might be able to whip up an XSLT transformation to generate the RSS pretty easily. RSS is *not* complicated (well, the RSS 1.0 RDF flavor is a tiny bit more verbose). Generating it out of any kind of structured back-end data is a snap.
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