Washington Post Article Scraper

Full Washington Post articles as clean, structured records — including stories that normally sit behind the paywall — with complete body text, headline, authors, section, timestamps, summary, tags and word count. One article URL in, one tidy record out.

What you get

• Beyond the paywall — restricted articles come back with their complete text
• The complete article — every paragraph of the body, in reading order
• Editorial metadata — headline, authors, section, publication & update times, summary, topic tags, word count
• No login, no subscription, no API key — paste the URL and run
• Nothing to install — runs fully in the cloud
• Always fresh — content is fetched live on every run, never a stale copy
• Stable schema — the same record shape for every article, easy to parse

Quick start

Input — just the article URL:

{
  "url": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/26/before-hegseth-fired-him-top-general-was-advised-drop-kid-rock-investigation/"
}

Example result

Real output for the URL above (article body truncated):

{
  "id": "WIE56LZRZZGTPF5VBZ6V57RQ74",
  "url": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/26/before-hegseth-fired-him-top-general-was-advised-drop-kid-rock-investigation/",
  "headline": "Before Hegseth fired him, top general was advised to drop Kid Rock probe",
  "byline": ["Dan Lamothe", "Noah Robertson"],
  "section": "Military",
  "sectionUrl": "/national-security/military",
  "firstPublished": "2026-08-26T23:09:52.644Z",
  "lastModified": "2026-08-26T23:09:52.884Z",
  "wordCount": 1363,
  "summary": "Gen. Randy George appeared troubled by the encounter with Gen. Chris LaNeve, the Army's No. 2 officer now favored for the service's top job, people familiar with the matter told The Post.",
  "tags": ["template-military", "wp-exclusive", "priorities"],
  "body": [
    "Days before the Army's top officer was abruptly fired earlier this year, he was advised by a fellow general now vying to replace him to stop the military's investigation into an unauthorized helicopter flyby of musician Kid Rock's Tennessee estate, three people familiar with the matter said.",
    "Gen. Randy George, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed as the Army chief of staff without explanation, felt it was important to follow typical protocol and determine whether any safety regulations had been violated during the March 28 flyby, these people said. Like some others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the episode.",
    "..."
  ]
}

Field reference

Field	Description
headline	Article title
seoHeadline	Longer headline variant used in search-result previews (when provided)
kicker	Short label shown above the headline (often empty)
byline	Author name(s)
section	News section the article appears in
sectionUrl	Link to that section on the site
summary	Short editor's description of the piece
tags	Topic labels attached by the publisher
firstPublished	Date and time the article was published
lastModified	Date and time the article was last updated
wordCount	Number of words in the article
body	Full article text — one list item per paragraph, in order
id	Stable publisher identifier (the same article always returns the same id)
url	The article URL that was fetched

Ideas

• Build a private archive of articles behind the paywall
• News monitoring and alert feeds
• Research and press tracking
• Databases for AI and content pipelines

FAQ

Does it really return paywalled articles? Yes — pieces the Post marks as restricted come back with their complete body text, not a teaser.

Do I need a Washington Post subscription? No — the actor needs only the public article URL.

Do some articles fail? A rare few pieces contain no article text at all (for example, photo galleries). Those return a clear error message.

Is the content fresh? Yes — every run fetches the article as it is published right now, including its latest update time.

Can I scrape many articles? Each run takes one article URL. Run the actor as often as you like — on a schedule, or once per URL — and every run adds one record to the dataset.