Introduction
Organizations these days need to be constantly “in the know” about developments in their markets, about their competitors, as well as their target audiences. And while there are countless sources of easily accessible news and information on the internet, tracking multiple sources manually can be exhausting, and can take up too much time.
Fortunately, there are certain news and media that have exposed their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which allow developers to fetch their stories and integrate them into other applications. These APIs are an excellent solution if you’d like to consume their content in another application, which can integrate your selected sources.
However, if you need to track a subject or a topic, integrating multiple sources is not the solution. Because the news on your topic can be published in any of the thousands of online sources. It is almost impossible to integrate all the sources and filter the information based on the topic of your interest. Moreover, to make matters worse, most of these sources would not have APIs or RSS feeds to integrate with other systems.
News APIs from news aggregators are an ingenious solution to such a problem. These aggregators fetch news from multiple sources and also enable you to integrate them with any third party or your own applications. In this article, let us understand what a News API is, and what are the top 5 news APIs that you can use to build or improve your applications. Let’s begin.
What is a News API?
Before trying to understand what’s a News API, let us first understand what’s an API. An API is an application programming interface, a kind of software intermediary between two software. In simpler terms, it is a piece of code that allows the exchange of information and data from one software to another. An API basically does the following things: 1) Define the requests and calls made, 2) how they are made, 3) the conventions followed when making the calls, and 4) the data formats used.
A News API, also known as a ‘news feed API’ is the same, except that it is a specialized API that connects applications to news sources. It can be used by businesses to obtain machine-readable data automatically from various news websites.
Thus, a News API allows organizations to extract and analyze news from news websites, and then present this news to their audience through their application. To understand more about news feed APIs, what they are and how they are useful to your business, read this article.
But, that’s for later. Right now, let us look at top 5 news APIs that developers can use in a number of different ways to benefit their organization.
Top 5 News APIs
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Contify
Contify’s newsfeed APIs not only provides aggregated news from thousands of websites, it also employs advanced Machine Learning, Text Analytics, and Natural Language Processing techniques to deliver just the contextually relevant news feeds that are enriched with meta-data. The news updates are enriched with entities such as name of the companies, location, and contextual meta-data such as the business event, and industry of the news article. Enriched News feeds APIs are great for a number of different use cases, including adding a “News” section to your app, website, driving a market and competitive intelligence program for your organization, tracking and monitoring companies or competitors, account intelligence, and identifying new business opportunities. Features that make Contify a highly recommended newsfeed API include:
- 200,000+ sources including online news, company websites, premium and niche publications, social media, regulatory portals, review websites, job boards, etc.
- Option to add your own sources, such as websites of your competitors or key customers.
- Option to add your own custom meta-data
- Enriched data with companies, locations, industry and business events.
- Multi-language support using SmartTranslate
- Delivery of information using RESTful APIs, Webhooks and/or RSS feeds.
Limitations: Contify news feeds are business focused. They don’t provide news updates such as sports, entertainment, politics, or general interests. Since Contify de-duplicates news, it is excellent for intelligence but not relevant for general media monitoring for brand mentions, etc.
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NewsAPI
Yes, this News API is named ‘News API’, go figure. Anyway, this is a simple and lightweight, yet robust News API that covers wide-ranging markets, including 80,000 news sources and blogs from over 55 countries. It is great for global news. It is very easy to integrate, and free for development. You get JSON results with simple HTTP GET requests, and/or can even use one of the SDKs available in your language. Features that make it a recommended news API include:
- Search using keywords and phrases, use operators such as “AND”, “NOT”, “OR” and “must”.
- Search news within specific timeframes in the past.
- Search news in specific domains, single or multiple.
- Search news in over 14 languages.
Limitation: Cannot add your own sources or track non-news sources such as companies’ websites.
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Bing News Search
Bing News Search API is a quite popular news API. This is the news API to use if you wish to create your own news app or website. Use it to allow your users to find headline news i.e. top stories from various parts of the world in different categories, news by category like business, sports, entertainment, etc., and trending articles on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Features that make it a highly recommended news API include:
- API metrics such as top queries, call volume, market distribution, response code summary, and many more.
- Bing has a whole ecosystem of APIs like Web Search, Image Search and Video Search which let you build a comprehensive web search app or website powered by Bing.
Limitation: You can use the API for free, but you’ll be limited to 3,000 transactions per month.
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MyAllies Breaking News
Financial news is something which a lot of users require, and MyAllies Breaking News API is a perfect solution for that. If you’re looking to create an app or website that delivers real-time business and financial news, including stock pricing from across the globe, this is the news API you need. It is easy to use, and allows three endpoints:
- Real-time news feed
- Company news
- Company details by stock letter symbol
Limitation: Says “free and no registration” required, but asks for credit card from developers, and might incur charges when used above quota. This quota isn’t specified.
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New York Times
This is not an aggregator API, but still a very powerful news API offering. New York Times, a leading global news publication, offers 11 public APIs to developers to access their data, and/or embed it into their applications. It is a great News API if you’re interested in news, multimedia, opinions, and other up-to-date information. The News APIs are RESTful, and return JSON objects with your search results. Some of the features that make it such a highly-recommended News API include:
- Allows you to search for headlines and other details from 1851 to today.
- Provides details of book reviews
- Provides lists of the publication’s most popular articles.
Limitations: The APIs are offered for non-commercial purposes only and are limited to 1,000 calls per day.
Conclusion
Which news API you choose for your organization depends upon what you need out of it. If you need for your business purposes, specialized APIs which offer news on a specific domain are handy, but a News API that offers a noise-free stream of intelligence on various industries, topics and domains is much better. A comprehensive news feed API like Contify can be useful for market and competitive intelligence purposes. However, if you need to build a News app or add news for your non-business users, general news aggregators like Bing News or New York Times can meet your expectations. Hopefully, this article will give you a good sense of the top 5 news APIs developers have been using these days, and allow you to find what you’re looking for.