In the last decade, altmetrics has opened space for indicators of attention and social impact of science and for revamping scientometrics. However, the centrality of traditional indicators in scientific production persists. There is a demand for data sources that may provide additional context and that can form the basis for indicators that can meaningfully speak to the interface between science and society. The present work demonstrates the potential of a structured database of press releases to serve as the basis for indicators of social attention in science that can be better contextualized and understood. To this end, press releases from three science news agencies were collected: Eurekalert! (USA), AlphaGalileo (United Kingdom) and Agência BORI (Brazil). These agencies make press releases about scientific articles available on their websites; however, important information such as article title, content, publication date, URL, DOI, are not made available in a structured form. Web scraping techniques were used to collect, organize and analyze this information. The use of web scraping, combined with MySQL database storage proved to be effective for collecting and managing information from these agencies' web pages, enabling comprehensive and contextualized analyses to be carried out. While press releases are not the only way to qualify and understand the social attention of science, the construction of the database and tests carried out have demonstrated that it can be a relevant source for this understanding.