Introduction to News APIs for Beginners

January 20, 2021 Claire Ward

Technology has changed almost every aspect of our lives today making it convenient and easy compared to before. For example, with a smartphone, you are able to access your bank account, watch the news, order meals, and even pay your bills from anywhere in the world.

These are things that have been made possible by APIs. They (APIs) have connected devices and software across the globe making the sharing of information easy and straightforward.

What is an API?

An API (Applications Programming Interface) is a computing interface that allows the exchange of information and data from one software product to another. It is used to define the requests and calls made and how they are made, the conventions followed when making the calls, and the data formats used.

For example, you have seen applications that allow one to create an account using Facebook. The application developers implement a Facebook API that helps the application to extract your details for your account creation. This is just one example of an API at work.

What is a News API?

Now that we know what an API is, let us dig deeper into News APIs. They are basically APIs that allow one to connect their applications with news websites. Through these APIs, one can extract, analyze, and present news articles to their audience through an application.

News APIs allow one to automatically and methodically collect information from multiple news sources. This information is then scanned and analyzed before it is used for different purposes. Some of the most popular news APIs include Google News, Fox, and Buzzfeed among others.

Sometimes, a person might think that it would be better for them to use Google for news instead of implementing a news API. Well, if you do a search on Google, chances are that you will get a lot of results. You will also get results that perfectly match your search query.

However, that will be it all. You will get the search results on Google but will not easily do anything with it. Google search lacks a way through which one can extract the search results for analysis. This means that you might need to manually collect the search results for further analysis and data mining. This will be time-consuming and most of the time, inaccurate due to human error.

What to Look for When Choosing a News API

When it comes to choosing the right news API that meets your requirements, there are a number of things that you should look at. They include;

1. Full Text or Headlines

Some news APIs extract just the headlines on news articles while others get you the headline and a snippet of the news article. If you want to get the entire article, you need to choose an API that allows you to get it.

2. Language

Some news APIs allow one to extract news articles in a particular language while others allow multiple languages.

3. Coverage

Do you want to extract news articles from just a few news websites or many news websites? You need to choose an API that can do exactly what you want.

4. Integration and Usage

You need to choose an API that is easy to use and that integrates with your applications without any issues. It is important to go through an API’s documentation and maybe test it before fully implementing it.

Conclusion

Data gathering is essential for all businesses. This has been made easy by APIs that do the work easily and within a short time. News APIs bridges the gap between companies that want to extract news information and the media outlets that offer the information. Imagine a situation where one has to go through multiple news websites to extract and analyze information manually. This would be very demanding and time-consuming. News APIs help organizations to avoid such situations.