Top 10 Best News APIs: Google News, Bloomberg, BING News and more

Published in

Rakuten RapidAPI

9 min readJun 14, 2019

The Internet is full of news outlets that you can use to stay abreast of the latest happenings in the world. With the current increase in Internet usage, most people are abandoning traditional media — such as newspapers and televisions — and heading online to quench their thirst for the latest news.

Some of the news media found online have exposed their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow developers to fetch their stories and integrate them into their applications.

We evaluated several news APIs based on the following four key criteria:

API features: We reviewed the outstanding features of each of the APIs.
Price: We examined the cost of implementing each of the APIs.
Data format: We assessed the data formats that each of the APIs supports.
Ease of use: We looked at the ease of integrating each of the APIs.

Ultimately, we came up with the following list of top 10 best news APIs.

1. Google News API

Google News is a popular news aggregating service that provides up-to-date news information, collected from numerous sources around the world. The service is available in 35 languages and can be accessed on the web and mobile operating systems.

API features: Although Google deprecated the Google News Search API and no longer maintains it, the API is still working and available for public access. The API allows you to integrate Google News search results into your application or web pages. You can use it to display topics, headlines, trending stories, URLs, and other news items from Google searches.

Price: The Google News Search API is available for free.

Data format: The API provides data in JSON format.

Ease of use: Google has provided comprehensive documentation to assist developers in embedding the API seamlessly and within minutes. Furthermore, there is an active community of developers who have created helpful tutorials that enable easy utilization of the Google News API.

2. Bloomberg API

Bloomberg is an award-winning platform that provides business news, financial information, market analysis, and other insightful data from around the world. It uses advanced technology to deliver up-to-date news and analytical data to assist businesses and individuals to make influential decisions.

API features: The Bloomberg API offers you round-the-clock programmatic access to the platform’s data. With the API, you can embed streaming real-time news, delayed and historical news, breaking news, historical data, in-depth analytics, and other financial market information — and assist your users to transform knowledge into profitable actions.

Price: The API is offered for free. However, for extensive, commercial uses, you’ll need to contact Bloomberg for pricing based on each use case.

Data format: You can pull Bloomberg’s data in multiple formats, including JSON, XML, and HTML.

Ease of use: Bloomberg provides easy-to-follow tutorials and documentations on how to use its API.

3. News API

The News API is a simple API that allows you to search more than 30,000 news outlets from around the world. For example, you can use the API to know the trending stories in the New York Times, new articles published about a product, or a company reviewed by a blog recently.

API features: The News API lets you search for published articles using keywords or phrases, languages, names of the publication sources, publication dates, and domain names of the publication sources. You can also sort the results according to the date published, the popularity of the publication source, or relevancy of the search keyword.

Price: For non-commercial purposes, the News API is offered for free. However, it comes with some restrictions such as access to delayed new articles, snippet article content, and 1,000 requests per day. For commercial purposes, which has fewer restrictions, the pricing starts from $449 per month.

Data format: The API performs quick GET HTTP requests and delivers results in JSON format.

Ease of use: The API is easy-to-use. Furthermore, you can use its documentation to assist you to get started implementing the API within minutes.

4. New York Times API

The New York Times is a leading American newspaper publication that boasts of readership and influence all over the world. The newspaper’s website is a rich source for finding news, multimedia, opinions, and other up-to-date information.

API features: The New York Times provides 11 public APIs to enable developers to access its data and embed into their applications. For example, the Archive API lists the publication’s articles on a month-by-month basis from 1851 to today, the Article Search API allows you to search for headlines and other details from 1851 to today, the Books API provides details of book reviews, and the Most Popular API provides lists of the publication’s most popular articles.

Price: The APIs are offered for non-commercial use only and limited to 1,000 calls per day.

Data format: The RESTful-styled New York Times APIs return JSON objects with your search results.

Ease of use: The New York Times has provided comprehensive documentations to assist developers to consume the APIs faster and without many hassles.

5. ESPN API

ESPN is an American sports platform that provides up-to-date news coverages, reviews, scores, and other highlights for a variety of sports, including NBA, Basketball, NFL, football, and MLB.

API features: ESPN offers a robust API for tapping into ESPN.com data and supercharging the functionalities of applications. With the API, you can get up-to-date news about the trending sports topics covering several teams and sportspersons from around the world, photos of athletes and teams, latest scores for a variety of games, and rankings of teams based on league, division, or other classification criteria.

Price: The ESPN API is offered for free.

Data format: You can get ESPN’s data in XML format or JSON format.

Ease of use: The ESPN API mysteriously lacks documentation. Therefore, it may be difficult to integrate into applications.

6. Bing News API

Bing News is a Microsoft-owned news aggregating service that displays the most recent news stories on the web and mobile devices.

API features: The Bing News Search API allows developers to send search queries to the platform and receive comprehensive results of the latest news, interesting articles, trending topics, and images sourced from around the world. The query results can be filtered by topic, publisher details, local news, and other searchable metadata.

Price: Microsoft offers a 7-day guest account for trying the API for free. You can also try the API using an Azure free account. For intensive usage, you can sign up for a paid Azure account, which employs a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Data format: The Bing News API delivers news results in JSON format.

Ease of use: There are step-by-step tutorials, developer documentations, and code samples to help you in transforming your application or web page into a news search machine.

7. Guardian API

The Guardian is a newspaper publication that is known for providing up-to-date news, sports information, commentaries, and opinions sourced from around the world.

API features: The Guardian Content API lets developers programmatically access the content available on the publication’s web portal and create incredible applications. The API stores more than two million pieces of different content — articles, audio, videos, images — from 1999 to date. It provides endpoints for getting a wide range of items, including the pieces of content in the API, the tags used, the available sections, and the editions found in the publication’s database. Furthermore, the API results can be filtered using various parameters to suit any need.

Price: For non-commercial usage, the API is offered for free. However, for commercial purposes, the API is priced depending on each use case.

Data format: The Guardian API delivers data in JSON format.

Ease of use: Guardian provides a playground where you can explore the API’s requests and results. There is also easy-to-follow documentation and supportive community to help you make the most of the API.

8. BBC News API

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a widely known media company that provides a wide range of educative and entertaining content, from the latest news, to sports news, to television features, to radio highlights — it has it all.

API features: BBC no longer provides public support for most of its APIs. During their heydays, third-party developers could use the APIs to fetch data from the BBC’s web portal and integrate them into their applications.

Price: BBC has deprecated most of its APIs and only offers them for free to its employees.

Data format: The BBC news API delivers data in a variety of formats, based on each use case — JSON, RSS, XML, or others.

Ease of use: BBC does not provide public documentation on how to use the API. Therefore, it can be difficult to use, especially for beginner developers.

9. Yahoo News API

Yahoo News is a popular news platform that provides the latest news stories and headlines, comprehensive video coverages, opinions, and images.

API features: Yahoo offers the Yahoo News API as part of its BOSS API suite of developer tools. With the API, you can leverage the power of the Yahoo Search engine technology and data to provide your users with up-to-date news information from around the world.

Price: Yahoo employs a simple pricing method based on the extent of usage. For receiving news results only, the price is $1.80 per 1,000 queries and limited to 50 results per query.

Data format: The RESTful API supports both XML and JSON data formats.

Ease of use: Yahoo has provided helpful documentation to assist developers in integrating the API without many hurdles. Furthermore, there is a vibrant BOSS developer community where ideas are shared on how to make the most of the API.

10. Financial Times API

Financial Times (FT) is a renowned publication that provides comprehensive business and economic news, politics, commentaries, expert analysis, and other financial data sourced from around the world.

API features: The Financial Times API lets you incorporate the publication’s data and create amazing digital products. With the API, you can extract full-text FT articles in real-time as well as 5+ years of archived information. The FT data feed is enhanced with metadata to assist in discoverability and processing. The metadata provides different details of an article’s content such as themes, names of individuals, names of organizations, and asset classes.

Price: The API is priced differently depending on each use case.

Data format: The FT API returns data in JSON format.

Ease of use: The API has been designed to enable easy implementation. Apart from providing a variety of developer resources, FT also has experienced product specialists that offer advice and support to users.

That’s Rakuten RapidAPI’s list of top 10 best news APIs. We hope you’ll find an API that you can use to provide your users with the latest information about the happenings around the world!

About Rakuten RapidAPI

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