News + Trend Summarizer

The first Apify actor for cross-source news trend detection. Monitors 45+ English-language RSS feeds, identifies exploding keywords week-over-week, and generates structured trend reports. Designed for journalists, marketers, SEO analysts, and content strategists who need to spot rising narratives before they peak.

Why This Actor?

There are 80+ news actors on Apify, but they are mostly single-source scrapers or article extractors. None has >5K users because they answer "what happened?" instead of "what's trending?". This actor is a trend detection engine — it aggregates dozens of sources and surfaces the keywords that are gaining momentum across the entire news ecosystem.

Features

• 45+ Default Sources — BBC, Guardian, NYT, CNN, Al Jazeera, NPR, Axios, Politico, TechCrunch, The Economist, and many more.
• Keyword Trend Detection — Extracts unigrams and bigrams, ranks by frequency × cross-source buzz × freshness.
• Configurable Time Window — Analyze last 1–30 days (default 7).
• Noise Filtering — Aggressive English stopwords + customizable exclusion list.
• Optional LLM Summaries — Generate narrative summaries of top trends via OpenAI (user's own API key).
• HTTP-Only — No browser, no proxies, no heavy compute. Runs in seconds.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
sources	array[string]	45 default RSS URLs	Override or extend news sources
timeWindowDays	integer	7	How many days back to analyze
topN	integer	20	Number of trending keywords to return
generateSummaries	boolean	false	Enable OpenAI narrative summary
openAiApiKey	string	null	Required if summaries enabled
excludeKeywords	array[string]	[]	Custom noise words to filter out
minArticleCount	integer	3	Minimum occurrences to qualify
maxConcurrency	integer	10	Max parallel RSS fetches
fetchDelayMs	integer	300	Delay between fetch batches

Output Example

{
  "trendingKeywords": [
    {
      "keyword": "ai regulation",
      "trendScore": 847.2,
      "articleCount": 34,
      "uniqueSources": 12,
      "sampleHeadlines": [
        {
          "headline": "EU Parliament passes landmark AI regulation bill",
          "source": "The Guardian",
          "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/...",
          "date": "2026-05-18T08:00:00.000Z"
        }
      ],
      "firstSeen": "2026-05-18T08:00:00.000Z",
      "lastSeen": "2026-05-20T14:30:00.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "summary": "This week, AI regulation dominated headlines...",
  "metadata": {
    "sourcesScanned": 43,
    "totalSourcesAttempted": 45,
    "articlesAnalyzed": 1874,
    "timeWindowDays": 7,
    "generatedAt": "2026-05-20T22:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

Trend Scoring Formula

trendScore = log(articleCount + 1) × sqrt(uniqueSources + 1) × freshnessBonus

• Cross-source buzz: Keywords appearing in many outlets score higher (dampens single-source spam).
• Freshness bonus: Keywords seen today get 1.5×, yesterday 1.2×.

Default Sources

BBC News, BBC World, Guardian, NYT, CNN, Al Jazeera, NPR, Axios, Politico, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, The Verge, Wired, Engadget, CNET, ZDNet, The Economist, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, USA Today, Independent, Time, Newsweek, The Hill, Vox, Slate, The Atlantic, New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Scientific American, Nature, Space.com, VentureBeat, Mashable, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, BBC Sport, ESPN, Deadline, Variety, CNBC.

Pricing

Pay Per Event

• Start event: $0.0005
• Result event: $0.0005

Approx. $0.02–0.05 per run depending on source count. No compute-unit charges.

Use Cases

• Journalists: Spot emerging stories before they saturate the cycle.
• Marketers: Identify trending topics for content calendars and ad campaigns.
• SEO Analysts: Find rising search queries tied to current events.
• Investors: Track sector-specific news momentum (tech, biotech, policy).

Disclaimer

This actor consumes publicly available RSS feeds. Always respect each outlet's Terms of Service and robots.txt. RSS feeds may change or become unavailable; the actor gracefully skips broken sources.