I missed this article on categorising news for use by computers:

<p>
      <em>"Computers and devices are largely unaware of events taking place in
the world. This could be changed if news were made available in a
computer-understandable form. In this paper we present XML documents
called NewsForms that represent the key points of 17 types of news
events. We discuss the benefits of computer-understandable news and
present the NewsExtract program for converting text news stories into
NewsForms. "</em>
    </p>