Yeah, RSS is what you are looking for.
RSS Stands/Stood For
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Basically, they are formatted so that it is easy for computers to read and parse and get short summaries of news posts, etc.
You would need to get a script like
http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
and get the rss feed from the news source you want.
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonl...t_page/rss.xml
to name a few