Article & Reel Maker

What does Article & Reel Maker do?

Article & Reel Maker turns the news on your subject into ready-to-publish content. Describe your niche in plain words, such as "UK education news" or "Formula 1", and it will:

• 📰 find today's stories on that subject in Google News, ranked by relevance, freshness and where they happened;
• 🔎 research a story from several current sources, or from one link, or from your own press release or notes;
• ✍️ write an original article in English, with source markers, an SEO title, slug, meta description and keywords, three Facebook captions and a short-video caption;
• 🌐 post it to WordPress as a draft or published, with tags and your featured image (optional);
• 🎬 render a vertical video reel (1080×1920, about 12 seconds, with music) for Reels, Shorts or TikTok (optional).

Run it once, or put it on a schedule and it will keep writing the newest stories without ever repeating one.

Who is it for?

• Niche news sites and blogs that want a steady flow of timely articles without writing each one from scratch.
• Social media managers who need captions and short videos for every story.
• Agencies running several sites: one saved task per site, each with its own memory.

How to use it

Choose one of three modes.

1. Find topics: see what is in the news

1. Set What to do to Find topics.
2. Enter Your subject, e.g. UK education news.
3. Start. Each result row is one story, with its rank, the publisher, how old it is and why it scored as it did.

Every row carries a ready-made entry (writeArticlesEntry) to paste into a Write articles run.

2. Write articles: write the stories you choose

1. Set What to do to Write articles.
2. Fill Articles to write with one entry per article. Each entry is one of these:
   • a topic, researched from several current sources: {"topic": "Teachers vote to strike over pay"};
   • a link, rewritten from that one page: {"url": "https://example.com/news/story"};
   • your own text, used as it is with no search: {"topic": "New library opens", "sources": [{"title": "Council press release", "text": "..."}]}.
3. Optionally add "imageUrl" and "imageAlt" to an entry for its featured image and reel photo.

3. Find and write: hands-off

Set What to do to Find and write, Number of articles to how many to write, and Date range to how far back to look: from the last 24 hours to the last 30 days. It finds the news, then writes the best stories that no earlier run has written. Add a schedule to publish several times a day.

Input

Only Your subject is needed to start. The other sections are optional:

Section	What it sets
Advanced discovery	Your own Google News searches, language and country, what counts as domestic, relevance keywords, trusted outlets. Fill these to override what is worked out from your subject.
Research	How old a source may be (7 days by default; 0 for evergreen topics).
Writing	AI model, your site's name and description, British or American English, source markers, minimum length, your own hashtags.
WordPress	Site address, username, application password, draft or publish, category, SEO plugin field prefix.
Reel	On or off, style, the name, address and section label shown, and your logo.
Memory	The storage that remembers written stories (one per site).

Output

One dataset row per article. Download it as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it through the API. A shortened example:

{
  "request": "Teachers vote to strike over pay",
  "status": "written",
  "title": "Teachers Back Strike Action in Pay Dispute",
  "wordCount": 412,
  "contentHtml": "<p>Teachers have voted to ...</p>",
  "contentText": "Teachers have voted to ...",
  "seo": {
    "slug": "teachers-strike-pay-dispute",
    "searchEngineTitle": "Teachers Vote to Strike Over Pay",
    "metaDescription": "Teachers have backed strike action ...",
    "keywords": "teachers strike, pay dispute, unions",
    "imageAltText": "Teachers on a picket line"
  },
  "facebookCaptions": ["...", "...", "..."],
  "reelCaption": "... #teachers #strike",
  "sources": [{"title": "...", "url": "https://...", "domain": "..."}],
  "wordpress": {"id": 128, "status": "draft", "editUrl": "https://example.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=128&action=edit"},
  "reel": {"url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/reel-...", "look": "broadcast:photo", "sizeMb": 1.4},
  "model": "google/gemini-2.5-flash",
  "usage": {"promptTokens": 4950, "completionTokens": 760}
}

An article that could not be written still gets a row, with status: "failed" and an error saying why: for example, no usable sources were found.

Posting to WordPress

1. In WordPress, go to Users → Profile → Application Passwords, enter a name such as "Apify" and click Add New Application Password.
2. Copy the password into WordPress application password, with your site address and username.
3. Leave Post as on Draft until you are happy with the results.

The application password is stored encrypted, is not your login password, and can be revoked in WordPress at any time. The connection is checked before anything is written, so a wrong password costs nothing.

SEO fields are saved for an SEO plugin that accepts them through the REST API. Set the field prefix for yours: hmt_ for Head Meta Tags, rank_math_ for Rank Math. Check the page source of the first post to confirm they arrived.

Firewalls: if your site sits behind Cloudflare or a security plugin, it may need to allow requests from Apify.

Reels

Tick Make a reel and each article also gets a short vertical video: the headline over your photo, a one-line summary, then your name, a call to action and your web address.

• Styles: Rotate walks through ten designed looks, one per reel, continuing across runs. You can also fix one style, or use the simpler presets.
• Photo: the article's imageUrl, or the default image for Find and write. Photos are never taken from the news sources, which are other publishers' property. Without a photo, a reel is still made in a plain style.
• Logo: upload one or give a link. Without one, your publication's name is shown instead.
• Where they are kept: in your memory storage, with a link on the article's row. They stay until you delete them. A run's own storage is deleted after your plan's retention period, so they are not kept there.
• Memory: runs with reels start with 4 GB of memory and take about a minute longer per article. Runs without reels use 1 GB.

Never writing the same story twice

Both writing modes record what they wrote in your memory storage (Memory storage name) for 31 days. Find and write skips any story already written, including another outlet's version of the same story. If you run several sites, give each its own storage name.

How much does it cost?

You pay only for what you get. Platform usage is included.

Event	Price
Topic found (each ranked story from Find topics)	$0.001
Article written	$0.04
Reel rendered	$0.10

Failed articles and failed reels are free. A Find topics run of 50 stories costs $0.05; an article with its reel costs $0.14.

Research and AI are billed separately by the two Apify Actors this one uses, at their own prices:

• RAG Web Browser searches and reads the sources: usually 2–4.5 cents per article on the Apify free plan, less on paid plans. Articles written from your own text make no search.
• OpenRouter runs the AI model by the tokens used: about half a cent per article with the default model on paid plans. On the Apify free plan, AI is charged at ten times that.

Working out search settings from your subject takes one small AI call, saved for 30 days. Every article row's usage field shows the tokens used. To cap what a run can cost, set a maximum charge per run in the run options: the Actor stops before an article or reel the limit would not cover, so you never lose one half-made.

Good to know

• Review before you publish. The articles are written by AI from the sources it found. They are told to keep to the facts in those sources, but they can still contain mistakes. Posting as Draft lets you check each one first.
• Articles are in English. The news you search can be in any language Google News covers.
• Images: use only images you have the right to publish.
• Apify free plan: AI replies are capped at 2,048 tokens. That is enough for the default model; some reasoning models run out of room and are retried.
• Google News results vary from one search to the next, so the same subject may give slightly different stories a few minutes apart.

FAQ

Can I choose the stories myself? Yes. Run Find topics, pick the rows you want, and paste their writeArticlesEntry values into a Write articles run.

Can I use a different AI model? Yes. Enter any OpenRouter model id under AI model, e.g. anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5.

Can I write from my own material? Yes. Give an entry sources with your text, and no search is made.

Something went wrong. Open the run's log: each step says what it did and why something was skipped. Failed articles also carry an error on their row.