To name a few, digital solutions have the capability to simplify the infrastructure, economy, intelligence systems, and security of a country. It has made our lives way more convenient than it was ever. You can now carry out many things using your smartphone, from ordering food and shopping to reading or watching news anywhere and anytime you want. Digitization has also created exciting opportunities for organizations to develop new products around this technology’s information. For example, financial analysts could extract information on stock performance, and companies and marketing agencies could identify important insights about customers and their behavior. Similarly, researchers can also leverage data science, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to extract in-depth insights from the day’s headlines. What connects the dots between the organizations wanting to extract information and the media they wish to analyze, monitor, and research? That’s news APIs. Let’s understand the concept behind them how they can help build your next product.
What is a news API?
You might know how a basic API works. An Application Programming Interface (API) provides a platform where two sites or software can interact. It can act as a building block that helps you automate your repetitive tasks and develop more functionality. For example, if you need to make an account on a website using Facebook, then it will extract your details out of facebook.com with the help of Facebook API. Next, the back end team of that website utilizes your details and creates your account on it. Similarly, news APIs can connect between online news and applications. They help you in different ways when you:
Create coverage reports automatically for your clients Utilize news stories in the form of a data source to be used in advanced AI apps Predict the results of elections
For this, you need an efficient way to obtain machine-readable data methodically and automatically from different news websites. You can scan, analyze, and enrich this data to serve various use cases that you have planned.
What are its different types?
APIs for a particular online news site such as the Guardian: Here, the data type and amount are based on that specific site, but the full article text appearing on the original site might not be provided. A news story feed is linked to original websites or publications. Structured data retrieved from different news sites and served as a service.
Why use it instead of Google?
Many of you must be thinking if you can search data from Google, why should you use news APIs instead? And it’s sensible to think so. Let me clear this for you. Yes, searching on Google certainly provides unmatched news coverage across the internet in addition to serving the right content according to your search query. It does not offer a method to extract or retrieve these results and perform more analysis and data mining over the content shown out of its indexed sites. As a result, you need someone to regularly collect the search results and paste it into spreadsheets or some tools. Moreover, Google may not index every news. And this is a time-consuming and unscalable approach to monitor news and perform its analysis. This way, you also won’t have the date and text of the article organized properly, and you would have to do manual data scraping from news websites. Hence, the efficient way is to use a decent news API, for that matter.
How to choose the right news API?
If you are convinced to go ahead with a news API, next, you need to choose the right one that justifies your needs. Below mentioned are some of the things you should keep in mind while choosing a news API:
Coverage: Think which kind of media outlet you want to cover – only the big news sites such as the New York Times, or you want to combine some prominent blogging sites that are relevant as well. Language: Check what languages you want the data or the results in. Is it only English or any other language as well? Headlines or full text: Many APIs provide just the headlines or the news stories’ snippets, which might not be resourceful for textual analysis. So, if you need them, go for an API that can provide you with full text and news articles’ headlines. Usability: Every API must be easy to use and comfortable for your team and developers. Hence, before choosing a news API, check its documentation and conventional standards it follows. Determine how it integrates with other tools. For better understanding, you can try its free trial version, if available. If you like it, then you are good to go.
Now, let’s quickly get to some of the best global news APIs that you can use to extract data and build your products.
Mediastack
Mediastack is a simple and free REST API that allows you to access blog articles and live news worldwide in real-time. Get data from any news source and discover headlines and trends, historical news data, access breaking news, and monitor brands. This REST API is built on a scalable cloud infrastructure that delivers news outcomes in JSON format, easy to use, and lightweight. The powerful API lets you access more than 7,500 news sources relevant to different topics from 50+ countries and available in 13 languages. It provides an easy method to customize your news and add it to your website or application. Mediastack includes a forever free plan which does not need your credit card details. Here, you are allowed 500 calls/month. Its paid plans start from $24.99, where you can take up to 10k calls/month. Currently, they are also offering a 20% discount on yearly billing for you to save more.
Webhose
If you are searching for a Google News API alternative, then Webhose is a great option you can consider. It delivers structured, unified, and aggregated data in XML and JSON formats by extracting it from 1 million+ websites, including blogs, news articles, forums, radio stations, etc. Webhose provides up-to-the-minute and comprehensive coverage and live data and news articles from global news websites. It allows you to segregate articles and the comments on them based on your requirements. The advanced API filters of Webhose include:
Entities: You can run queries regarding organizations, people, and locations using the API Archived data: You can extract data even from the year 2008 and up to the present day to supercharge your analytics and research Sentiment: The efficient models leveraging machine learning can deliver public sentiments whether they are positive or negative Social insights: The API provides the performance score of queries to inform you of viral things instantly
Webhose has the capability of indexing 10M feeds daily from 230 countries and in 76 languages. It also allows you to access the 25TB of historical data. Many organizations use Webhose for various purposes like financial analysis, AI and machine learning, market research, media, and monitoring.
News API
News API is yet another REST API, which is simple and lightweight. It returns JSON metadata relevant for articles and headlines that are spread across the web. The API covers wide-ranging markets, including sources from over 55 countries. With News API, everything is fast and asynchronously cached to deliver a quick response. In case you are still in the developmental stage, you can enjoy a free trial. The news API supports effortless integration with the help of HTTP GET requests to get results in JSON. It also includes a source filter using which you can extract data from your desired list of sources. You can also benefit from the feature of ‘news type’ that allows you to search a certain media type. If you use this API, you will find its metadata response really fascinating. The reason is the API orders data in a readable fashion and extracts the data easily with its title, description, author, photo, and URL. The versatile API is available for both free and paid plans. You get 500 requests/day and basic support for the free plan, whereas the paid plans start from $449/month for 250k requests/month and email support. If billed annually, you get 20% off.
NewscatcherAPI
Use enriched data by using the services of NewscatcherAPI that indexes and crawls hundreds and thousands of data from news articles every day. Hence, you don’t have to run crawls all by yourself and, instead, allow them to do all the heavy lifting. In addition to title, time, and data of news articles, NewscatcherAPI also enriches the datasets with precise editorial location, article topics, and website rank. As a result, you will have a broader view of where an article is sourced from, and you can also separate high-ranked sites from low-ranked ones to get high-quality articles. Don’t waste your time collecting, normalizing, and deduplicating data from thousands of sites. Instead, use the API to monitor media and PR to understand industry trends, know your competitors, and track customers through customized data searches. Conduct analysis and research to get an idea about the media footprints of the market players. You can also build custom news aggregators using a news stream. Use NewscatcherAPI for free for up to 15k API calls and 21 requests every hour. The paid plan starts from $399/month for 250k API calls, 5 requests/second, and other features.
New York Times
New York Times API is another good option you can consider for your product. You can access the API for free of cost for non-commercial usage. All you need to do to get started with the site is to create an account in it. They offer different types of APIs like:
Article search API: for all articles from NYT Archive API: to get the entire New York Times (NYT) articles metadata for a specific month Books API: for NYT list of best sellers and book reviews Community API: for user comments Most popular APIs: for popular NYT articles on its website Geo API: for geographically linked information RSS feeds: to access section feeds of NYT RSS Movie reviews API: to check movie reviews in NYT Semantic API: to get data about organizations, places, and people Times Wire API: to access published NYT articles in real-time Times Tags API: to get a controlled vocabulary Top Stories API: to get articles showing currently on the home page or front section of NYT
They provide an API key to track your usage levels for each user because the number of requests is limited in a day. The Archive API allows you to extract data back from 1851 and deliver results in JSON files.
Contify
Enrich your apps with machine-readable and properly structured news feeds with the help of Contify. It tags, deduplicates, and aggregates data and delivers through RSS feeds, webhooks, and RESTful APIs. Contify offers wide coverage of clean and company-based intelligence data relevant to specific business or industry, instead of keyword-based feeds. It collects data from 200k+ sources, including company websites, online news, social media, reviews websites, regulatory portals, job boards, niche and premium publications. In addition to that, it allows you to integrate your preferred sources for fetching user-relevant data from anywhere across the globe. Contify also provides multi-language support through SmartTranslate so that you can source intel from publications in 100s of languages. They combine AI and machine-learning technologies with human intelligence to deliver deduplicated and actionable data feed, identify trends, and maintain system integrity. The platform also includes noise-filtering algorithms like NLP, NER, and disambiguation, to ensure a constant flow of quality updates. With API endpoints and customized taxonomy, they structure all the sourced data with their endpoints to align your business goals. Enjoy frictionless collaboration using a fully dedicated account management.
HackerNews
HackerNews (HN) is actually a social news site that Y Combinator runs, which focuses on sharing entrepreneurship and computer science news stories. Its partnership with Firebase makes sure HackerNews data is available to people in near real-time. You can access Firebase easily from iOS, Android, and through the web. The HackerNews API returns up to 500 new, best, and top stories. You can also access up to 200 latest job stories, Show HN, and Ask HN. Apart from stories and job information, you can access comments as well.
Connexun
Search news content in real-time by taking advantage of the sophisticated technology of Connexun that crawls and indexes thousands of sources every day. Analyzing the published content becomes easy with their live dataset containing cleaned-up news feeds. It allows you to discover trending global news that their unique algorithms evaluate. You can also filter news by selecting the language of your choice and news items. Select two countries of your interest and access all the latest news from them using their InterCountry API. Similarly, you can discover popular news from the media outlets of a selected country or news from a country frequently mentioned by global news sources. There’s one more fascinating feature of Connexun – it lets you access news from a particular place using its longitude and latitude. With its powerful search engine, Connexun API can display the textual news content related to a keyword or topic and is acquired from 1 million pages each month.
Aylien
Build intelligent digital products, applications, models, and processes using Aylien that provides enriched, structured, and tagged data in real-time. The news API of Aylien supports NLP and harnesses AI to access deep business insights from news content available in 5 languages along with their translations. Their end-to-end pipeline understands, aggregates, and delivers clean and ingestible data from 80k+ vetted and trusted sources across the globe from 200+ countries. Their research-powered NLP models are capable of understanding and tagging 1000s of articles per minute. The source coverage includes 5 million+ entities, topical tagging from 4k known categories, event detection, article deduplication, sentiment analysis, and metadata extraction containing author and source data. Stay alert all the time with push notifications and custom webhooks. Aylien also offers 25+ filters, searchable tags, and advanced analytics to provide a better user experience.
Conclusion
With the information provided above, I hope you now have a good understanding of what news APIs are all about. Thus, go for any of the News APIs that you find are apt to your business needs and extract data without any hassle to build your product.
