BBC News Article Scraper

Extract full article text, headline, description, and metadata from any bbc.com article URL. BBC News is the world's most visited news website and covers global events across politics, science, culture, and technology with no subscription required.

Why Use This Actor?

• Global news monitoring - BBC covers every major world event with reliable, edited reporting.
• Media research - BBC neutral editorial position makes it a common baseline in comparative media studies.
• Multilingual comparison - cross-reference BBC English with BBC World Service or regional sites.
• Education datasets - BBC News writing is clear and factual, ideal for training language models.

How It Works

This actor uses only HTTP requests - no browser, no Selenium, no Playwright. Articles are extracted in seconds with RAM usage well under 256 MB.

Input

{
  "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/example-id",
  "urls": [
    "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/article-one",
    "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/article-two"
  ]
,
  "mode": "article",
  "limit": 10
}

Output

{
  "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv26e7yd89o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss",
  "source": "BBC News",
  "title": "What does Makerfield make of by-election and can Burnham win?",
  "description": "Andy Burnham says he will look to stand in the constituency, after Labour MP Josh Simons announces his resignation.",
  "content": "The residents of Makerfield are about to find themselves at the epicentre of the political universe as a by-election battle that could decide the next prime minister is set to take place on their doorstep. The constituency, which is home to around 76,000 voters in the suburbs of Wigan and nearby former mining towns and villages, has not traditionally been a hotbed of political intrigue....",
  "image": "https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/b267/live/88444110-507b-11f1-b682-cf91850925ea.jpg",
  "language": "en-GB",
  "word_count": 1200,
  "published_date": "",
  "modified_date": "",
  "authors": [],
  "categories": "",
  "tags": ""
}

Fetch Latest News

Set mode to "latest" to fetch the newest article URLs and titles from BBC News instead of extracting a single article.

Input:

{
  "mode": "latest",
  "limit": 10
}

Output - array of objects:

[
  {
    "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyxxjgdn94o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss",
    "title": "Spat at, threatened and kidnapped: British Jews tell of rising antisemitism",
    "published_date": "Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:00:02 GMT",
    "source": "BBC News"
  }
  //...
]

Source: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml (RSS feed)

Cron Schedule: Auto-Fetch Newest Articles

Combine mode: "latest" and mode: "article" to keep a fresh feed running on autopilot:

1. Schedule a recurring run of this Actor with {"mode": "latest", "limit": 20} via Apify Schedules (UI ▸ Schedules ▸ Create new). A cron expression like */30 * * * * runs it every 30 minutes.
2. Webhook the dataset of the latest run into another Actor run with mode: "article" and the new URLs as input — Apify integrations let you chain runs via the "Actor finished" webhook without any glue code.
3. The article-mode run extracts the full body, image, authors, and metadata for each URL and appends to your master dataset.

Common cron expressions:

Frequency	Cron
Every 15 minutes	*/15 * * * *
Hourly	0 * * * *
Every 6 hours	0 */6 * * *
Daily at 06:00 UTC	0 6 * * *

Notes

• Works on bbc.com/news and bbc.co.uk/news article URLs
• BBC Sport, BBC Bitesize, and other subdomains may require adjustment

Other News Actors

Need a different news source? All actors in this collection:

Actor	Source
aljazeera-scraper	Al Jazeera
apnews-scraper	AP News
bbc-scraper	BBC News
cnbc-scraper	CNBC
forbes-scraper	Forbes
fortune-scraper	Fortune
ft-scraper	Financial Times
guardian-scraper	The Guardian
msn-scraper	MSN News
nytimes-scraper	New York Times
reuters-scraper	Reuters
scmp-scraper	South China Morning Post
techcrunch-scraper	TechCrunch
upi-scraper	UPI
yahoo-finance-scraper	Yahoo Finance
smart-news-loader	Any URL - adaptive HTTP loader
bloomberg-scraper	Bloomberg

All actors support mode: "latest" for fetching newest article URLs from each source.