📰 404 Media Articles Scraper

Every article 404 Media publishes, as a flat row with headline, author, date, tags, summary and link. Set how many you want, start the run, export to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML. No login, no API key, no RSS parsing on your side.

404 Media is a journalist owned publication covering hacking, surveillance, platform policy and the parts of the technology industry that end up in a diligence file. It has no public API, and reading it means opening the site. This Actor reads the public feed and writes each article into a dataset you can sort, filter and keep.

Who uses it	What they use the feed for
🔎 Diligence teams	Checking whether a target company, its founders or its data practices have been written about
📈 Analysts covering tech	Tracking which platforms and vendors keep appearing in coverage, and how often
📰 Newsrooms and media monitors	Catching a story within minutes of publication instead of once a day
📚 Researchers	Building a dated corpus of technology reporting with author and tag attached

📋 What it does

💡 Why it matters: a name that shows up in reporting about leaked data, a lawsuit or a shutdown is a fact you want before you sign, not after. This makes that coverage searchable.

• 📰 Pulls the public article feed, newest first, with no account and no key.
• 🔢 You set the volume. One article or a large back pull, controlled by a single input.
• 🏷 Keeps the tags. Each article carries the categories 404 Media filed it under, such as Privacy or OpenAI.
• ✍️ Keeps the byline and the timestamp, so you can sort by author or build a timeline.
• 📦 One row per article, the same fields every run, so daily runs append into one clean table.
• 💾 Exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML, from the run page or the API.

📊 Output

Every article is one flat row. null means the field was absent from that article.

Field	Type	Description
📝 title	string	Article headline as published
🔗 url	string	Permanent link to the article on 404media.co
✍️ author	string	Byline, for example Joseph Cox
🏷 categories	array	Tags 404 Media filed the article under, for example ["Privacy", "OpenAI"]
📅 publishedAt	string	ISO publication timestamp
📄 summary	string	The article's published summary paragraph, not the full body
🖼 imageUrl	string	Lead image for the article
🏛 source	string	Always 404 Media
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection
⚠️ error	string	null on a normal row

Example rows

{
  "imageUrl": "https://storage.ghost.io/c/0f/76/0f76b548-bc58-4f25-abc3-3f5ebca07da4/content/images/2026/09/Prompts---v2.jpg",
  "title": "Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats",
  "url": "https://www.404media.co/inside-project-lily-the-humans-reading-your-chatgpt-chats/",
  "author": "Joseph Cox",
  "categories": [
    "Privacy",
    "OpenAI"
  ],
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-14T14:22:43.000Z",
  "summary": "Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.",
  "source": "404 Media",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T15:10:55.336Z",
  "error": null
}

{
  "imageUrl": "https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1614724723656-457e78e0b50b?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDN8fE1lcmN1cnl8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzg5MTQ2ODAxfDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000",
  "title": "Mercury Is Shrinking Way Faster Than We Thought, Scientists Discover",
  "url": "https://www.404media.co/mercury-is-shrinking-way-faster-than-we-thought-scientists-discover/",
  "author": "Becky Ferreira",
  "categories": [
    "The Abstract"
  ],
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-12T10:00:10.000Z",
  "summary": "The planet’s radius may have shrunk by between four and six miles since it was formed due to global cooling, a contraction that is up to 30 percent larger than previously estimated.",
  "source": "404 Media",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-14T15:10:55.336Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

	What you get
No credentials	The feed is public. No account, no key, no cookie to keep alive.
Ten fields, every run	Same columns every time, so a daily run appends instead of needing a cleanup pass.
Tags kept intact	Filter to Privacy or OpenAI in a spreadsheet without reading a single article.
Runs on a schedule	Point it at a schedule and the dataset fills itself while you do something else.
You pay per row	No subscription. A run that returns nothing costs nothing.

🚀 How to use it

1. Create a free Apify account. New accounts start with $5 of credit.
2. Open the Actor and select Try for free.
3. Set maxItems to the number of articles you want.
4. Select Start, then export from the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.
5. For monitoring, attach a schedule and let it run hourly or daily.

A first run:

{
  "maxItems": 10
}

A larger pull:

{
  "maxItems": 200
}

⚙️ Input

Field	Required	Description
maxItems	No	How many articles to collect per run. Default 10

💰 Pricing

Pay per result. No subscription, and no Apify platform usage on top.

Apify plan	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Diamond
Per article row	$0.021	$0.0203	$0.0197	$0.019	$0.019	$0.019

Rows collected	Cost on the Free plan
100	$2.10
1,000	$21.00
10,000	$210.00

Free plan runs return up to 10 rows as a preview. Any paid Apify plan lifts that to 1,000,000 per run.

🔌 Integrate with any app

The dataset is available through the Apify API as soon as the run finishes. Use run-sync-get-dataset-items for a one-shot call, webhooks to trigger what happens next, or the Make, Zapier, Airbyte and LangChain integrations listed on the Actor page.

🤖 Use with an AI agent

Give an agent live access to the feed over the Model Context Protocol:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=acquistion-automation/404media-articles-scraper"

Then ask it in plain language for the latest articles on a topic and have it read the result back.

❓ Frequently asked questions

Does each row contain the full article text? No. Each row carries the article's published summary paragraph, along with the headline, link, author, date, tags and lead image. Open the url for the body.

Can I filter by author or topic inside the Actor? No. It collects the main feed newest first. Filter the author or categories column afterwards in a spreadsheet or in SQL.

How far back does it go? As far as the public feed reaches. Set a higher maxItems to walk further back, and the run stops when the feed runs out.

Why is a field empty? Some articles are published without an author or without a lead image. The Actor returns what the site shows, so an empty field means the value was missing at the source.

Do I need a proxy? No. Requests and retries are handled inside the Actor and included in the price.

What can I export? CSV, Excel, JSON and XML from the run page, or JSON straight from the API.

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About Acquisition Automation Co.

We build automation for people buying businesses. The repetitive part of an acquisition search, checking listings, pulling public records, tracking owners and assets, is work a machine should do, so the buyer's time goes into judging deals instead of collecting them.

We add new Actors regularly. If there is a source you need and do not see here, tell us.

🆘 Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab of this Actor with your run ID, the input you used, and what you expected to get back.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by 404 Media. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using that data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable law.