Global News Event Signals — GDELT Records

Open source data. No API key. Pay per record.

This actor turns the GDELT Project's global news event stream into clean, per-event signal records. Each run reads a bounded number of GDELT's public 15-minute event files and delivers one record per coded event — the event type (CAMEO), the tone, the mention/source/article counts, the action geography, the source article URL, and the org/state actor codes. Person-name actor fields are excluded at ingest, so no individual is named in a record.

What this is, in one paragraph

GDELT machine-codes the world's news into structured events every 15 minutes. This actor reads those event files directly and flattens each event into a row you can load into a spreadsheet, a database, or a pipeline: what kind of event, how it was toned, how widely it was reported, where it happened, and a link to a source article. It emits the CAMEO actor codes (country / type / known-group) — never the free-text actor names, which can be individuals. Values are verbatim; nothing is scored or re-derived.

Who buys this and for what job

• Risk, geopolitical, and macro teams tracking event signals (protests, statements, conflict, cooperation) by geography and tone.
• Media-intelligence and research teams who want a structured event feed with source links.
• Quant and data teams feeding tone and event counts into models on a bounded, repeatable window.
• Data engineers wanting a keyless, one-call event feed.

Person suppression (absolute) and bounded windows

Two hard rules are built into the code:

• No person names. GDELT's Actor1Name / Actor2Name columns carry free-text names that can be natural persons. This actor never reads those columns — only CAMEO code fields are emitted, so a person's name cannot enter a record. Verified by the acceptance suite (a row with person names in those columns is ingested and the emitted record contains no name).
• Bounded windows only. A run reads at most maxFiles recent 15-minute files (hard cap 96 = one day). There is no unbounded backfill — the window is bounded in code.

Pricing

Event	Free plan	Bronze	Silver	Gold / Platinum / Diamond
news_event_record	$0.05	$0.045	$0.04	$0.0335

Delivered before charged. Blocked runs and empty windows cost nothing.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxFiles	integer	3	Recent 15-minute files to read (newest first). Hard cap 96 (one day).
actionCountry	string	—	Optional FIPS country code (US, UK, CH…) to keep only events in that country.
maxRecords	integer	500	Ceiling on records delivered and billed.

Each 15-minute file holds ~1,400 events, so the default (3 files) is a bounded sample of a few thousand events.

Output

One JSON object per event. Example:

{
  "record_id": "1210034567",
  "event_date": "20260818",
  "year": "2026",
  "actor1_code": "USA",
  "actor1_country": "USA",
  "actor1_type1": "GOV",
  "actor2_code": "BUS",
  "event_code": "046",
  "event_root_code": "04",
  "quad_class": "1",
  "goldstein_scale": "7.0",
  "num_mentions": "4",
  "num_sources": "1",
  "num_articles": "4",
  "avg_tone": "0.307",
  "action_geo_fullname": "Washington, District of Columbia, United States",
  "action_geo_country": "US",
  "source_url": "https://example.com/news-article",
  "source": "GDELT Project (GDELT 2.0 Events)",
  "licence": "The GDELT Project — open data ...",
  "attribution": "Source: The GDELT Project",
  "disclaimer": "Machine-coded global news event signals ... not verified facts and not a person database ...",
  "observed_at": "2026-08-18T00:00:00Z"
}

An unbilled RUN_RECEIPT records the robots check, the latest slot, files read, events seen, delivered, and whether charged equals delivered.

Cost guidance

One news_event_record per delivered event: cost = events pulled × your plan's per-record price. 1,000 events is $50 (Free) / $33.50 (Gold).

Honest limitations

• Machine-coded signals, not verified facts. GDELT's automated coding has inherent noise. Use the source URL to verify; these are signals, not confirmed events.
• Event records, not the theme/entity graph. This is the GDELT Events feed (event codes, tone, geography, counts). It does not include GDELT's GKG theme/person/organisation graph — deliberately, to keep person names out.
• Actor codes, not names. Actor fields are CAMEO codes (country/type/known-group), never free-text names.
• Bounded window. Recent files only, capped; not a historical backfill.

Differentiation

This is a per-event signal record from GDELT's open event stream — a structured, source-linked event feed. It is not a brand/social monitor or an alerting service, and (unlike the NexGen Signal statistical actors) it is a news-event signal, not an official government statistic.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of the NexGen Signal family of official-source, pay-per-record products:

• Eurostat House Price Index
• Eurostat Waste Generation
• Eurostat Waste Treatment
• Eurostat Business & Consumer Confidence
• Eurostat Income Distribution (EU-SILC)
• Eurostat Construction Production
• Eurostat Immigration Statistics
• Eurostat Emigration Statistics
• Eurostat Road Freight Transport
• Organization Sanctions & LEI Risk

Source: The GDELT Project (open data, free to use with attribution). Reformatted to event-signal records; values verbatim. Person-name actor fields excluded at ingest. Machine-coded signals — not verified facts, not a person database.