Apart from automatic marking of headlines (by means of filters) Newsticker provides the possibility to fully process newly arrived headlines. Instead of reading headlines yourself you can tell Newsticker to do that for you.
In order to do so write a function which takes two arguments
the name of the corresponding news feed,
the decoded headline.
and add it to newsticker-new-item-functions. Each function
contained in this list is called once for each new headline.
Depending on the feed name and the contents of the new headline you
can
newsticker-download-images),
newsticker-download-enclosures),