UN Press Release Monitor - Official Updates and Changes

Keep official UN releases traceable

For news and policy research: collect releases from the official UN Secretary-General and General Assembly press listings. Document codes, source dates, links and bounded publisher excerpts keep each observation traceable.

Open this Actor in Console · First run · Results · Cost · Full guide

Try this Actor

• First run: Use Latest UN Secretary-General Press Releases below: one listing page and up to five saved releases. Inspect the excerpt and source link before adding topic filters or saved comparisons.
• Read the results: Open the default Dataset for release rows and SUMMARY for listing coverage. Changed fields refer to saved listing observations, with original source links available for follow-up.
• Keep in mind: This does not collect every UN body or full release text. Excerpts are publisher text, not generated summaries. Literal keywords can miss words outside the excerpt, and capped listings are not a globally newest-first news feed.

Latest UN Secretary-General Press Releases — copy this input into the JSON editor in Console.

{
  "bodies": [
    "secretary-general"
  ],
  "maxResults": 5,
  "maxPagesPerBody": 1
}

Result preview

The dataset view highlights these columns:

• Release ID · releaseId
• Document code · documentCode
• Headline · title
• Release date · publishedDate
• UN listing · sourceBody
• Publisher excerpt · excerpt

Use the original source links and the field definitions below when interpreting the results. CSV works well for flat columns; JSON preserves nested values.

Usage and pricing

Base result rate on the FREE tier: $2 per 1,000 press release observations. The Pricing tab shows your plan's result rate and any Actor Start charge. Set a small result limit for the first run; the requested limit is not a guarantee of that many results.

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Full guide

Collect structured metadata from two official United Nations press-release listings. Each row has the publisher’s document code, headline, release date, canonical source URL and short publisher excerpt. Use literal topic filters and saved comparisons to build a press desk queue or track corrected headlines and excerpts.

Quick start

{} and Console prefill read one page from each supported listing and save at most 20 records. Empty bodies uses both supported bodies. Each additional page follows only the exact next page in the same listing. windowTruncated in SUMMARY shows more listing records exist; an intentional page/result cap is normal bounded coverage, not a source failure. A filtered run can correctly return zero. Some source pages or categories can return access challenges; these fail visibly without bypass.

Output and interpretation

publishedDate is day precision as displayed by the publisher. The listing’s internal noon timestamp is not presented as an exact publication time. documentCode is copied from the displayed field, not inferred from a URL. releaseId hashes the canonical source document URL; duplicate documents across listings save once. Bodies are processed in sorted order, so results are not globally date-ranked.

excerpt is the publisher’s listing excerpt, not a generated summary or full text. excerptTruncated only indicates additional shortening by this Actor. excerptHash covers the complete listing excerpt. Topic filters inspect the returned title, document code and bounded excerpt; they can miss topics present only in the full release. No article bodies are fetched to expand matching. A source statement is not independently verified by this Actor; no conflict prediction, numeric risk score, official voting record or inferred policy effect is generated.

Overview fields: releaseId, documentCode, title, publishedDate, sourceBody, excerpt, url, matchedTerms, comparisonStatus, changedFields, observedAt. Export JSON for nested evidence and section arrays. Every row has an observation time; it is not a source publication time.

Saved comparisons

Set comparePrevious: true to annotate matching rows as new, changed or unchanged. onlyChanges: true implies comparison and skips unchanged rows. A first run saves matching observations and logs a baseline warning. SUMMARY.historyUpdated confirms the final history write. No-op runs warn and may correctly return zero results.

History scope includes the sorted body list, keywords, date filters, excerpt length and snapshotName. Page/result limits do not change the scope. Comparisons cover title, document code, displayed release date and full listing-excerpt hash. A correction outside the listing excerpt cannot be detected. No missing-release or deletion inference is made from a rolling window.

Only confirmed saved rows advance the named persistent key-value-store history. Failed or charge-rejected writes do not advance it. Prior observations are retained on partial runs. One writer per history scope is required; a final read detects conflicting updates but this is not a transactional lock. Malformed history fails with an actionable error; choose a new snapshotName. History is capped at 20,000 identities. A result cap may leave unseen records for a later comparison run.

Coverage, failures and charging

No API key or login is required. Public-source requests use SSRF/DNS/redirect safeguards, robots checks and bounded compressed-body decoding. A request takes at most 25 seconds and remains within maxRunSeconds (default 240) and the platform deadline minus 25 seconds. Transient failures get at most two retries.

SUMMARY reports source coverage, failures, not-reached sources, saved rows, unchanged skips and time/spend limits. Errors and access challenges never become dataset rows. All-source failures fail the run; a successful source with an empty filter result warns. Source, history or budget failures make coverage incomplete. An intentional result/page limit is a bounded request. Do not interpret a partial or truncated observation as complete coverage.

Planned price: $0.002 per saved record on FREE/BRONZE, $0.0016 SILVER and $0.0012 GOLD/PLATINUM/DIAMOND, plus a $0.00005 Actor Start event. The Store pricing tab is authoritative. Unchanged skipped records and diagnostic errors do not create dataset charges. Normal platform usage may also apply according to the Store plan.

Three exact example inputs

Latest UN Secretary-General Press Releases

Read up to five official Secretary-General press releases with codes, dates, short publisher excerpts and source URLs.

Use the copyable first-run input above.

Latest UN General Assembly Press Releases

Read up to five official General Assembly press releases from the public publisher listing.

{
  "bodies": [
    "general-assembly"
  ],
  "maxResults": 5,
  "maxPagesPerBody": 1
}

UN Press Desk Watch - Two Official Listings

Read the current bounded Secretary-General and General Assembly press-release lists with deduplicated document links.

{
  "bodies": [
    "secretary-general",
    "general-assembly"
  ],
  "maxResults": 20,
  "maxPagesPerBody": 1
}

Sources and reuse

Sources are the explicit Secretary-General and General Assembly Press Release listings. Each eligible row must be labelled “Press Release”; live blogs and other types are excluded. The official UN policy manual, sections 5.34–5.35 identifies press releases as public-domain content. The general website terms and separate restrictions on databases remain relevant: this Actor stays within those explicit press-release pages, metadata and bounded publisher excerpts. It does not download full article bodies, photos, logos, audiovisual content, third-party speeches or UN databases. No UN endorsement is implied.

Development

Node 20+, exact apify 3.7.2 and cheerio 1.1.2; basic-ftp 6.2.2 override. Run npm ci --ignore-scripts then npm test. Use an isolated CRAWLEE_STORAGE_DIR for local runs. Local and cloud bounded checks establish sample behavior, not exhaustive coverage or customer demand.

Help with your run

Open the Issues tab on this Actor with the run URL, the input field that caused trouble and what you expected to receive. Remove API keys and private information before posting.

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Understand your run

Open Run report in the run’s Output tab for saved-record counts, reported source issues and limits, and suggested next steps. Use CSV export to take the saved results into a spreadsheet. The existing JSON results and detailed machine-readable summary remain available.

The report reflects this run’s recorded coverage. A successful run or a saved result does not establish that every possible source record was collected.