Mediastack API

Overview

Mediastack provides a REST API for accessing news data, designed to support applications requiring real-time and historical news aggregation. The API consolidates articles from thousands of global news sources, offering structured data in JSON format. Developers can integrate Mediastack to fetch headlines, article content, category information, and source details, enabling the creation of custom news feeds, content publishing platforms, and market intelligence dashboards.

The service is structured to cater to various use cases, from individual developers building small-scale projects to enterprises requiring extensive data volumes. It offers endpoints for fetching top headlines, searching for specific keywords, filtering by country, language, category, and source. For instance, a content platform might use Mediastack to populate a 'trending news' section, while a market research firm could analyze news sentiment related to specific companies or industries over time. The API's ability to provide both live and historical data allows for both immediate reporting and retrospective analysis.

Mediastack is particularly well-suited for scenarios where developers need to integrate diverse news content without managing individual RSS feeds or web scraping infrastructure. Its query parameters allow for precise control over the data retrieved, such as requesting all articles mentioning a specific company from financial news sources in the last 24 hours. The API also includes pagination features to manage large result sets efficiently. While the free tier offers a basic entry point, paid plans provide higher request limits, HTTPS encryption, and access to more advanced features like historical data and expanded source coverage, which are often critical for production environments.

The API's developer experience is supported by comprehensive documentation and code examples in multiple programming languages, aiming to streamline the integration process. This accessibility helps developers quickly implement news data fetching capabilities into their applications. However, it's important to note the limitations of the free tier, which notably lacks HTTPS encryption, a standard security feature for many web APIs today, as highlighted by general API security recommendations from resources like Mozilla Developer Network on HSTS. For production applications, upgrading to a paid plan that includes HTTPS is generally recommended to secure data in transit.

Key features

• Real-time News Data: Access to current news articles as they are published across thousands of global sources.
• Historical News Data: Ability to query past news articles, useful for trend analysis and historical research (available on paid plans).
• Extensive Source Coverage: Aggregates content from a broad range of international news publishers.
• Advanced Filtering: Filter news articles by keywords, categories, countries, languages, and specific sources.
• Category Classification: News articles are automatically categorized (e.g., business, sports, technology) for easier topic-based retrieval.
• Multi-language Support: Retrieve news in various languages to cater to diverse audiences.
• JSON Output: Data is returned in a standardized JSON format, facilitating parsing and integration.
• Scalable Infrastructure: Designed to handle varying request volumes, from small projects to enterprise-level applications.

Pricing

Mediastack offers a free tier and several paid plans, with pricing based on the number of API requests per month. As of 2026-05-28, the pricing structure is as follows:

For detailed and up-to-date pricing information, refer to the official Mediastack pricing page.

Common integrations

Mediastack is designed for integration into various types of applications. While specific pre-built connectors are not widely advertised, its RESTful nature allows for integration with any platform capable of making HTTP requests. Common integration scenarios include:

• Content Management Systems (CMS): Powering dynamic news sections or content feeds within platforms like WordPress or custom CMS solutions.
• Data Analytics Platforms: Feeding news data into tools for sentiment analysis, trend identification, or competitive intelligence.
• Mobile Applications: Displaying real-time news updates within iOS or Android apps.
• Business Intelligence (BI) Dashboards: Incorporating news headlines relevant to specific industries or companies into BI tools.
• CRM Systems: Enriching customer profiles or sales intelligence with relevant industry news.
• Marketing Automation Platforms: Triggering actions or personalizing content based on recent news events.

Developers can find detailed API usage instructions and code examples in the Mediastack API documentation.

Alternatives

For developers evaluating news APIs, several alternatives offer similar or complementary functionalities:

• NewsAPI.org: Offers real-time and historical news data with a focus on ease of use and broad source coverage, providing a similar service for news aggregation.
• GNews: Provides a straightforward news API for fetching articles, often highlighted for its simplicity and competitive pricing.
• New York Times Developer Network: Offers access to New York Times articles, useful for applications requiring content from a specific, authoritative source, though not a broad aggregator like Mediastack.
• Amazon Comprehend: While not a news aggregator, AWS Comprehend can process news text for sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and topic modeling, often used in conjunction with news APIs for deeper insights.

Getting started

To get started with Mediastack, you typically sign up for an API key and then make HTTP GET requests to the API endpoints. The following example demonstrates how to fetch the latest news headlines using cURL, a common command-line tool for making HTTP requests. This example assumes you have an API key (replace YOUR_API_KEY with your actual key).

curl 'http://api.mediastack.com/v1/news
    ?access_key=YOUR_API_KEY
    &countries=us,gb
    &languages=en
    &categories=technology,business
    &limit=3'

This cURL command requests 3 news articles in English from the US and Great Britain, specifically within the 'technology' and 'business' categories. The response will be a JSON object containing an array of news articles, each with details such as title, description, URL, image, category, and publication date.

For more detailed examples and to explore other programming languages like PHP, Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, and jQuery, refer to the Mediastack documentation.