The Complete Guide to Selecting a News API in 2022

Seeing as how the Internet is essentially one giant news source, adopting bespoke technology that delivers news could seem counterintuitive at first glance. Yet the problem facing organizations today is not lack of data, but lack of insights. And insights – financial, media, reputational, market, regulatory, and more – can only be derived at scale from structured data constantly harvested from reliable and updated sources.

This is why organizations worldwide are turning to advanced News APIs. These mission-critical APIs help meet the challenge of unstructured data head-on. How? By providing the coverage, latency, and quality of data that information-sensitive global enterprises require to effectively navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape.

What organizations need a News API?

News APIs are in use by multiple companies across multiple geographies and in multiple industries – too many to list comprehensively in this post. Here are a few key industries that rely heavily on this type of tech:

• Media intelligence – Media intelligence platforms analyze billions of online data points and synthesize insights about content performance, industry and social trends, and brand equity. Yet media intelligence platforms need to scan millions of stories from media platforms, blogs, and influencers – as well as looping in accurate readership, audience, sentiment, engagement, and other metadata. The right News API with the right data makes all the difference.  

• Sales intelligence – Sales intelligence platforms assist sales leaders in predicting which prospects are most likely to convert, identifying the specific value propositions that prospects will respond to, and helping teams reach out directly to prospects at the point in time when are most likely to engage. Yet sales intelligence platforms are only as effective as the data they consume. Sales intelligence data collected by cutting-edge tools like News API supply critical and objective context to the data gathered by internal sources.

• Regulatory compliance tracking and adverse media screening – Adverse media screening is a powerful addition to any compliance war chest, as well as a crucial element of Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), Know Your Customer (KYC), Countering the Financing of Terror (CFT), and other regulatory compliance regimes. Yet adverse media screening solutions have trouble keeping track of the mass of data generated daily on customers and companies – raising the danger of missing key risk signals. Advanced News API platforms (like Webz.io’s) consume news data from millions of sources in tens of languages, then use NLP to distill the meaning and sentiment behind every article, story, and image. This data is structured and enriched to deliver better adverse media insights based on better data.

• Financial analysis – Global financial institutions need access to high-quality data to deliver data-driven investment strategies to customers. Leveraging a comprehensive news dataset, predictive modeling, and natural language processing capabilities, financial services organizations can gauge the impact of sentiment and emotions on stocks and financial trends on a global scale. Webz.io’s News API scours 2 million data sources in 120 different languages with over 10 years of history – delivering the depth of coverage and insights that the financial sector demands.

• Market research and business intelligence – Multinational brands need access to low-latency, high-quality news data for industry research and competitive analysis. Digital agencies need news data to evaluate the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns – setting up complex queries and tracking hundreds of thousands of mentions. Webz.io’s News API helps these organizations track trends, while dramatically reducing the cost, time, and resources dedicated to data management.

Most common limitations of News APIs 

The plethora of news and content sites covering so many different domains means that organizations struggle to find a news API that can deliver the comprehensive coverage they need – including the ability to search articles in a range of different languages.

Many leading APIs still deliver news data in machine-unreadable formats – meaning their data can’t be easily digested and integrated into existing solutions. News data coverage isn’t always continuous either – often there is high latency for all sites. Alternately, primary news sites maybe crawled more frequently while smaller niche sites are only occasionally crawled – even if these niche sites are the most relevant. 

Another challenge many organizations face is scale: when they want to scale, their News API just isn’t advanced enough to scale with them. Finally, many News APIs only include current data – with no historical data archive whatsoever, not to mention an archive reaching back more than 10 years (which Webz.io offers).

What kind of News API is right for your organization?

When considering which advanced News API platform to adopt, ask yourself:

1. What are your data requirements? Do you know the types of news sites you want to cover, and will that coverage change in the future?
2. How do you need the data to be structured to integrate into your existing infrastructure? Do you have any specific technical limitations that need to be taken into account?
3. Do you have the time and resources to crawl data, especially if you intend to scale in the near future?
4. How quickly do you intend to scale? Will these plans affect any of the previous considerations?

The two types of News API

Webz.io offers two types of News APIs to meet the unique needs of each customer.

Enriched News API

Our Enriched News API offers a ready-made news feed with NLP-enriched data that can be quickly integrated into any application. More enriched data translates into faster detection of important events affect stock value, brand or product. Enriched News API offers:

• Comprehensive coverage of the top 50,000+ global news sources in multiple languages
• Entity and article-level sentiment with five different types of article-level sentiment
• Smart entity extraction including advanced classification of entities into over 200 categories 
• News coverage from last 30 days
• Full text and automatically generated summary of each article with the most relevant phrases 
• Content deduplication
• Reader comment counts

Structured News API

Webz.io’s Structured News API is a news data feed with comprehensive coverage of news articles from a massive news repository with basic NLP-enrichment. This version of News API includes access to a wide range of news articles – crucial for organizations that need to stay ahead of industry trends, conduct competitive analysis of hundreds of products simultaneously, or provide comprehensive brand monitoring. Structured News API offers:

• Wide coverage of over a million global news sources in multiple languages
• Basic sentiment analysis with structured data delivered in JSON and XML format
• Filtered searches according to persons, locations, organizations, keyword, location, social shares in social media, and more
• Access to more than 10 years of archived news stories
• Full article text
• Full text of reader comments 
• Basic URL deduplication

What to look for in a News API?

With new content posted every minute, a News API needs to scan a massive number of sources – from social media, news sites, company sites, blogs, podcasts, influencers and more. In addition, it needs to include accurate readership, audience, sentiment, engagement, and other metadata. For this reason, it’s crucial that the data powering this platform conforms to four key criteria: 

• Coverage – To ensure maximum depth of insights, news sources should include multiple counties, in multiple languages, and also include both major global sites and long tale coverage from smaller niche websites. To ensure the most comprehensive data coverage, sites large and small should be regularly and thoroughly crawled. 

• Latency – A data stream needs to be fresh – with up-to-date data that’s noise-free and constantly gathered and updated by smart, adaptive web crawlers.

• Quality – News can be subtle. It involves reading between the headlines. Only enriched data can deliver key insights and customer sentiments with full text, along with clean metadata that includes entities, source, categories, author name, publication date and more. A quality news API needs to be able to avoid common issues like text bleeding (when text from the ads gets mixed up with the text of the actual article) and be able to automatically parse differences in US/European date formats.

• History – To capture a true perspective, data needs to go back at least a decade – including historical data from news, blogs, online forums and reviews from across the web.

Further, when choosing a News API, consider whether the dataset is created and updated via ethical crawling. Does the supplier use user agent and fixed IPs, and comply with robots.txt? This ensures data is safe for business use since site owners can easily block crawlers if they choose. 

Also, consider whether the News API enables simple addition of new sources, includes licensed content and whether the News API offers a high level of service and support via a dedicated customer service representative for your organization.

How Webz.io’s News API can help

To maximize insights and minimize efforts, it’s best to leave the news data collection to the experts. Webz.io’s News API constantly consumes news data from millions of sources, in more than 170 languages from across the web, and includes 50TB of historical data dating back to 2008. Webz.io also offers additional APIs that provide the full scope of mentions including blogs, forums and review (ecommerce) sites. Webz.io’s advanced platform uses NLP to distill the meaning and sentiment behind every article, story and image – in near real-time. This data is structured and enriched to make it quickly and easily readable by media intelligence platforms. The end result: better news insights based on better data.

To see how Webz.io can maximize news insights for your organization, talk to one of our experts today!