News & Press Release Monitor

Watch company newsrooms, blogs and press pages and get one clean record per article — with new-item detection between runs, so a scheduled run emits only what's genuinely new. Optional sentiment scoring, entity extraction and signed webhooks.

What it does

Point it at RSS/Atom feeds or plain newsroom URLs — it auto-discovers the feed behind a page, so you don't have to hunt for one. Each run fetches every source, keeps state in a named key-value store, and by default emits only items it hasn't seen before.

That state is what turns this from a feed reader into a monitor: schedule it hourly and each run produces a clean diff instead of the same fifty articles over and over.

On top of that it can score sentiment, extract entities (organisations, people, tickers, money amounts, percentages, dates), and POST each new item to your webhook with an HMAC signature.

Features

• Feed auto-discovery — give it a newsroom page URL and it finds the RSS/Atom feed.
• New-item detection — onlyNew emits just the delta, with state kept in a named store.
• Independent monitors — use different storeName values to run separate watchlists that don't interfere.
• Keyword filtering — keep only items matching your terms.
• Sentiment scoring — a −1 to 1 score plus a positive/negative/neutral label.
• Entity extraction — organisations, people, tickers, money, percentages and dates from title and summary.
• Webhooks with HMAC — POST new items to your endpoint, signed with webhookSecret via X-Signature.
• Event selection — fire on every new item, only on keyword matches, or on sentiment thresholds.

What people use it for

• Competitor monitoring — know within the hour when a rival announces something.
• PR and brand tracking — watch coverage and sentiment about your own company.
• Investment research — monitor portfolio companies' press releases for material news.
• Content curation — feed a newsletter or Slack channel with filtered industry news.
• Crisis detection — trigger a webhook when negative-sentiment coverage appears.

How new-item detection works

Seen items are recorded in a named key-value store — storeName, defaulting to news-press-monitor-state. On each run, anything already in that store is suppressed when onlyNew is on.

Two practical consequences:

1. The first run is your baseline. It will emit whatever's currently in the feeds. Runs after that emit only new items.
2. Separate monitors need separate stores. Running one task for competitors and another for your own brand? Give each its own storeName, or they'll suppress each other's items.

To re-emit everything (a backfill or a test), set onlyNew to false or point storeName at a fresh name.

Webhook payloads

Set webhookUrl and each qualifying item is POSTed to you as JSON. With webhookSecret set, an X-Signature header carries an HMAC-SHA256 of the payload — verify it server-side before trusting the request. Use webhookEvents to fire on new_item, keyword_match or a sentiment threshold instead of everything.

Input

sources is required and accepts feed URLs or plain page URLs. Keep onlyNew on for monitoring; turn it off for a one-time backfill.

Field	Type	Default	What it does
sources (required)	array	["https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/", "https://openai.com/news/"]	RSS/Atom feed URLs, or plain newsroom/blog page URLs (the actor auto-discovers their feeds).
keywords	array	[]	Only keep items whose title/summary contains ANY of these (case-insensitive). Empty = all.
onlyNew	boolean	true	Emit only items not seen in previous runs (state kept in a named key-value store). Disable to emit everything each run.
maxItemsPerSource	integer	50	Cap per source per run. Range 1–500.
storeName	string	news-press-monitor-state	Named key-value store for seen-item state. Use different names to run independent monitors.
doAnalyzeSentiment	boolean	true	Add sentiment score (-1 to 1) and label (positive/negative/neutral) to each item using a lightweight lexicon.
doExtractEntities	boolean	true	Extract organizations, people, tickers, money amounts, percentages, and dates from title+summary.
webhookUrl	string	—	POST each new item (or alert) to this URL. Payload includes the full item record.
webhookEvents	array	["new_item"]	When to fire webhook: 'new_item' (every new item), 'keyword_match' (only items matching keywords), 'sentiment_negative' (negative sentiment), 'entity_match' (specific entities).
webhookSecret	string	—	HMAC-SHA256 secret for verifying webhook payloads. If set, X-Signature header is included.

Input example

{
  "sources": [
    "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/"
  ],
  "onlyNew": false,
  "maxItemsPerSource": 10,
  "doAnalyzeSentiment": false,
  "doExtractEntities": false,
  "storeName": "news-press-monitor-state",
  "webhookEvents": [
    "new_item"
  ]
}

Output

One record per article: source and feed identity, title, URL, publication timestamp, summary, an isNew flag, plus sentiment and entities when those analyses are enabled.

Every dataset record contains: source, feedUrl, feedTitle, title, url, publishedAt, summary, categories, isNew, fetchedAt.

Output example

A real record from a run of this Actor:

{
  "source": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/",
  "feedUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/rss/",
  "feedTitle": "Cloudflare Blog",
  "title": "A revisit of remote Spectre attacks on Cloudflare Workers",
  "url": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/revisiting-spectre-attacks-on-workers/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-19T16:00:28.000Z",
  "summary": "In 2024 and 2025, we reassessed remote Spectre attacks on our Workers infrastructure. We share details about the new attack primitives like Spectre gadgets, remote timers, achieving co-location and how new defenses furth …",
  "categories": [
    "Attacks",
    "Edge",
    "Research",
    "… +1 more"
  ],
  "isNew": true,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-08-20T02:32:24.858Z"
}

Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or JSONL from the Console, or pull it programmatically through the Apify API and any of the official clients.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start if you already have an Apify account).
2. Fill in the input fields described above — the defaults already produce a working run.
3. Press Start and watch the log; results stream into the dataset as they are found.
4. When the run finishes, open the Output/Storage tab and export as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Runs can be scheduled (hourly, daily, weekly) and wired into Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, webhooks or your own backend through Apify integrations. Everything the Console does is also available over the Apify API.

Pricing

This Actor is billed on Apify's pay-per-event model: a small charge when a run starts, plus a charge for each result written to the dataset. You only pay for records you actually receive — a run that finds nothing costs only the start event. Current rates are always shown on the Pricing tab of this page, and the run log prints your usage as it goes.

Free-plan credits from Apify cover a large amount of light usage, so you can evaluate the Actor before committing to anything.

FAQ

Do I need to find the RSS feed myself?

No. Pass the newsroom or blog URL and the Actor attempts feed discovery. Passing a known feed URL directly is still the most reliable option when you have one.

What if a site has no feed at all?

Discovery will fail for that source. Most newsrooms, blogs and press pages still publish RSS or Atom, even when they don't advertise it — check /rss, /feed or /atom.xml on the domain.

How good is the sentiment analysis?

It's a lightweight lexicon-based score — fast, cheap and directionally useful for spotting tone shifts across many articles. It is not a trained model and will misread sarcasm and industry jargon. Use it for triage, not as ground truth.

Can I monitor Google News or a search query?

Anything with a feed URL works, including feed-producing search services. Point sources at the feed and treat it like any other.

How often should I schedule it?

Hourly suits most competitive monitoring. Every 15 minutes is reasonable for breaking-news use cases. Because only new items are emitted, frequent runs stay cheap.

Why did an item appear twice?

Usually because the same article is syndicated on two feeds you're watching, or a publisher changed the item's URL/GUID. Deduplicate on the article url downstream if that matters.

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Legal and responsible use

This Actor collects only publicly available information. You are responsible for how you use the data, including compliance with the target site's Terms of Service, robots directives, copyright, and data protection law such as GDPR and CCPA. Do not use it to gather personal data without a lawful basis.

Support and feedback

Found a bug, hit a site change, or need an extra field? Open a ticket on the Issues tab of this Actor — issues are read and fixed. Feature requests and custom-scraper enquiries are welcome through the same channel.