Web scraping - how to identify main content on a webpage
It might be more useful to extract the RSS feeds (<link type="application/rss+xml" href="..."/>) on that page and parse the data in the feed to get the main content.
Given a news article webpage (from any major news source such as times or bloomberg), I want to  identify the main article content on that page and throw out the other misc elements such as ads, menus, sidebars, user comments. 
What's a generic way of doing this that will work on most major news sites?  
What are some good tools or libraries for data mining? (preferably python based)