News & Media Monitor (Event Clustering + Sentiment)

What does News & Media Monitor do?

Give it one or more keywords and it searches news articles from thousands of sources worldwide — but instead of handing back a flat list of articles, it groups coverage of the same real-world story together, showing you how many outlets picked it up and their average sentiment. It also supports incremental scheduled runs, so you can point it at Apify's Scheduler and only ever fetch new coverage since the last run. No API key or third-party account needed — access is built in.

Why use News & Media Monitor?

• No account or API key needed — just add keywords and run; access to the underlying news API is included
• See the story, not just the article list — 7 outlets covering the same event show up as one grouped item with a source count and average sentiment, not 7 disconnected rows you have to de-duplicate yourself
• Brand and topic monitoring — track what's being written about a company, product, or event as it happens, and how sentiment shifts across outlets
• Competitor and market research — see how widely a story spread and which outlets picked it up
• Built for scheduling — turn on incremental mode, schedule the Actor to run daily via Apify's Scheduler, and it will only fetch articles published since its last run

How to use News & Media Monitor

1. Open the Actor's Input tab and add one or more Keywords to search for (e.g. electric vehicles).
2. Optionally narrow results with Languages, a Date from/to range, or a different Sort by order.
3. Click Start and download the results from the Dataset tab once the run finishes.
4. To monitor a topic over time: turn on Incremental monitoring mode and add a Schedule to run the Actor daily (or hourly) — each run will only fetch articles published since the previous one.

Input

See the Input tab for the full list of options. Only Keywords is required. Two options shape the output the most:

• Group into stories (event clustering) — on by default. Groups articles about the same event into one dataset item instead of a flat article list.
• Incremental monitoring mode — off by default. When on, each scheduled run only fetches articles newer than the previous run for the same keywords/languages.

Output

With event clustering (the default), each dataset item is one story, with every source that covered it:

[
  {
    "eventUri": "eng-11971843",
    "title": "Two senior officials step down after undercover report",
    "firstSeenDateTime": "2026-09-04T07:30:23Z",
    "sourceCount": 7,
    "articleCount": 7,
    "averageSentiment": 0.13,
    "sources": [
      { "title": "BBC", "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/...", "date": "2026-09-04T07:30:23Z", "sentiment": 0.19 },
      { "title": "The Telegraph", "url": "https://www.telegraph.co.uk/...", "date": "2026-09-04T07:54:23Z", "sentiment": 0.22 }
    ]
  }
]

With event clustering turned off, each dataset item is one raw article as returned by the underlying API (title, body, url, source, date, sentiment, and more).

What does sentiment mean? It's a score from about -1 (very negative tone) to +1 (very positive tone), with values near 0 being neutral. averageSentiment is the mean of that score across every source covering a story.

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel from the Apify Console.

Tips

• Keep Max articles low (e.g. 50–100) — this Actor's news-API access is shared across all users on a monthly quota.
• Use a narrow Date from/to range and specific Keywords to get more relevant results per search.
• For ongoing monitoring, combine Incremental monitoring mode with a daily Schedule rather than running large one-off pulls — it fetches only new articles each time, which is both faster and easier on the shared quota.

Real-time API access (Standby mode)

Besides normal Console/scheduled runs, this Actor also runs in Standby mode — a stable HTTP endpoint you can call directly for a single, real-time lookup instead of starting a full Actor run.

Base URL: your Actor's Standby URL, shown on the Standby tab in Apify Console (format https://<username>--<actor-name>.apify.actor).

Authentication: Authorization: Bearer <your Apify API token> header (or ?token=<token> query param).

Endpoints:

• GET /search — pass parameters as query string, e.g.: GET /search?keywords=electric+vehicles&languages=eng&maxArticles=20 (comma-separate multiple keywords/languages)
• POST /search — pass a JSON body with the same fields as the Actor's input schema, e.g.:

  { "keywords": ["electric vehicles"], "languages": ["eng"], "maxArticles": 20 }
  

Both return:

{ "articleCount": 20, "results": [ /* stories or articles, same shape as the Dataset output */ ] }

A 429 response means the shared monthly quota is exhausted; a 400 response means the input was invalid (e.g. missing keywords). Full interactive API docs (Swagger UI) are on the API tab in Console. Note: incremental monitoring mode is a batch-run-only feature and isn't available via Standby.

FAQ & support

Why did my run fail with a "shared monthly quota" error? This Actor's news-API access is shared across all its users with a monthly cap. Once that's reached, runs fail immediately (without using Apify compute) until it resets on the 1st of the next month.

Can I search in a specific language only? Yes — add one or more languages to the Languages input, either as ISO 639 3-letter codes (eng, deu, spa) or common English names (English, German, Spanish) — both are accepted.

How does incremental mode know what's new? It keeps a small checkpoint (the newest article timestamp seen) per unique combination of keywords/languages, stored privately in your own Apify account. Each run reads that checkpoint and only asks for articles published since then. The checkpoint has day-level precision, so the boundary day may occasionally include an article you've already seen.

Our Actors are ethical and do not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. They only extract what is publicly available through the source API. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data (e.g. names mentioned in articles). Personal data is protected by the GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers.

If you run into an issue or have a feature request, use the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Store.