USA Today Articles Scraper

What does USA Today Articles Scraper do?

USA Today Articles Scraper extracts full news articles from usatoday.com, USA Today's flagship news site, across every major section: U.S. News, Politics, Sports, Entertainment, Life, Money, Travel, Opinion, Investigations, Real Estate, Video, Humankind, and the Archives. For every article it discovers, it returns the complete headline, byline, publish and update timestamps, full body text, every image URL, and video URLs when present - not just a summary snippet. Running it on Apify means no servers to manage, one-click scheduling for fresh headlines every hour or day, and instant export to JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Why use USA Today Articles Scraper?

• Media monitoring - track how USA Today covers a topic, industry, or public figure over time.
• Content aggregation - feed a news dashboard, newsletter, or research dataset with clean, structured articles instead of raw HTML.
• Trend and sentiment research - pull full article text at scale for downstream NLP or analytics pipelines.
• Competitive and market intelligence - watch USA Today's Money and Politics sections for coverage that affects your business.

How to use USA Today Articles Scraper

1. Click Try for free on the Actor page (or open the Input tab if you're already running it).
2. Pick which sections to crawl - all thirteen are selected by default so you get full-site coverage out of the box.
3. Optionally tune maxArticlesPerSection and maxTotalArticles to control run size and cost.
4. Click Start and watch results land in the dataset in real time.
5. Export the finished dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or XML, or pull it via the Apify API.

Input

Field	Type	Description
sections	array	Which sections to crawl. Defaults to all thirteen.
maxArticlesPerSection	integer	Cap on articles fetched per section (default 30).
maxTotalArticles	integer	Safety cap on total articles per run (default 200).

See the Input tab for the full schema with descriptions and defaults.

Example input:

{
  "sections": ["sports", "money", "politics"],
  "maxArticlesPerSection": 20,
  "maxTotalArticles": 100
}

Output

Each dataset item is one article. Example:

{
  "url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2026/08/17/example-headline/91345664007/",
  "headline": "Example headline about a real MLB story",
  "shortHeadline": "Shorter version of the headline",
  "description": "One-sentence summary of the article.",
  "section": "sports",
  "articleSection": "sports",
  "datePublished": "2026-08-17T10:00:00Z",
  "dateModified": "2026-08-17T12:00:00Z",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true,
  "authorName": "Jane Doe",
  "authorJobTitle": "Sports Reporter",
  "authorUrl": "https://www.usatoday.com/staff/1234/jane-doe/",
  "publisherName": "USA TODAY",
  "heroImageUrl": "https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/authoring/authoring-images/example.jpg",
  "images": ["https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/authoring/authoring-images/example.jpg"],
  "videoUrls": [],
  "tags": ["MLB", "Baseball"],
  "bodyText": "Full multi-paragraph article body text..."
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Data table

Field	Description
url	Canonical article URL
headline / shortHeadline	Full and short headline variants
description	Article summary/deck
section / articleSection	Crawled section and the site's own taxonomy label
datePublished / dateModified	ISO 8601 timestamps
isAccessibleForFree	false if the article is behind USA Today's subscriber paywall
authorName / authorJobTitle / authorUrl	Byline detail
heroImageUrl / images	Hero image and every inline image URL
videoUrls	Direct video URLs, when the article embeds one
tags	Editorial tags/keywords
bodyText	Full article body text

Pricing / Cost estimation

This Actor uses Apify's Pay Per Event pricing at $1 per 1,000 articles scraped, well below comparable news-article scrapers on Apify Store. A typical run covering a handful of sections with default limits costs a fraction of a cent to a few cents. No subscription or minimum spend required - you only pay for what you scrape.

Tips or Advanced options

• Narrow sections to just the ones you care about to cut run time and cost.
• Lower maxArticlesPerSection for a lightweight "what's new right now" check; raise maxTotalArticles for deeper historical sweeps of the Archives section.
• Schedule the Actor hourly or daily on Apify to build a continuously growing dataset of USA Today coverage.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

This Actor only reads publicly accessible pages on usatoday.com and does not bypass any paywall or login. Paywalled articles are still returned with isAccessibleForFree: false so you can filter them out downstream. Site layout changes on USA Today's end may occasionally require an update to this Actor - please use the Issues tab to report anything that looks wrong. Need a custom variant (different sections, extra fields, a different Gannett/USA Today Network site)? Reach out via the Issues tab.