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.
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.
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.