Batch Updating Collections

The Media Cloud Directory is made up of over 50,000 individual media Sources. These are organized into Collections, sets of media sources grouped by some shared property; the most common are our Geographic Collections. We strive to regularly update these Collections, and many are maintained with partners and users just like you. Email us if you’d like access to help maintain or expand our collections: support@mediacloud.org.

This short guide introduces the process of batch updating a Collection via support for exporting and importing CSV files.

If you are planning to update a Collection to add new sources and review existing ones, you can start by visiting the webpage for that Collection and clicking the “Download Source CSV” button. This will download a CSV file that you can open in Excel to review all the Sources currently in that Collection.

If you are planning to create a brand new Collection, you can start with this empty version of our batch editing CSV.

Each column holds data about a single media Source. You can edit any field (except id and name) to update how the media source is shown to people searching in the system. See the Media Source Guide for details on what each column means, and what values each supports.

Save the updated data back to a CSV. 

1. Visit the Collection webpage you’d like to update (or click the “create a collection” button on the Directory homepage) and click the “Edit” button.
2. Scroll halfway down to the “Add/Remove Sources” area.
3. If you want to scrape all the newly created sources for RSS and Google News Sitemap feeds, make sure the “Automatically Discover RSS feeds” box is checked. 
4. Click the “Upload CSV” button and select the updated CSV file you created.

You should see a little spinner for a second, and then a small “Upload: filename” confirmation note under the button. That’s it, you’re done 🎉 You’ll get an email in a few hours summarizing the results of your upload, but they are available in the system immediately.

The email might indicate some sources were skipped or otherwise had problems. Review each item labeled with a warning (⚠️) and manually add each source that might not have been added already.