How To Download Historical News Data With an API

Before knowing how to download historical news data with a news API, we must understand what historical news data is. Historical News Data refers to the data that gives us information about a certain event that occurred at a particular time which had been broadcasted by different media outlets in the past.

But, as we are aware of the fact that tracking, scanning and extracting historical data manually is time-consuming and extremely difficult.

Luckily, we have Newsdata.io that provides a news API to fetch news data from all over the world.

NewsData.io is a news API that provides live and historical news from a database of 100,000+ sources across 206 countries and 89 languages. Historical access works through the Archive endpoint, and how far back you can go depends on your plan. You can collect the data in JSON, or download it as CSV or Excel.

How do you download historical news data with a news API?

Register for an API key, pick a paid plan that covers the time period you need, then call the archive endpoint with from_date and to_date plus filters like keyword, country, language or category. The response comes back in JSON, and you can also download historical data as CSV or Excel. For large one-time datasets, you can use the historical data request form.

Here are some widely used and known applications of Historical news data.

Financial Analysis: Compare stock data over time, spot trends, and market forecasts against 2-year-old select articles from thousands of sources. Forecast the market and stay ahead of your competitors.

Market Research: Find out where the market has gone and where you can go with access to our historical data. Extract relevant news data to help shape your product launch and determine where and how to impact your business.

Media & Web Monitoring: Expand your reach, also, learn more about the brands you manage with historical news data from thousands of sources. Build brand value and stay ahead of the competition.

AI & Machine Learning: Use NLP, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to uncover new ideas. With a plethora of news data starting in 2019, you can easily create as well as train machine models to improve and automate your business goals.

How to Download Historical News Data With NewsData.io

Step 1: Create an account and get your API key. Visit NewsData.io and register. The free plan lets you test the platform, but historical access needs a paid plan.

Step 2: Choose a plan that covers your date range. Pick the plan whose archive window includes the period you want to analyse. See the pricing page.

Step 3: Call the Archive endpoint. Send a request to the archive endpoint with your date range:

https://newsdata.io/api/1/archive?apikey=YOUR_API_KEY&q=electric vehicle&from_date=2025-01-01&to_date=2025-03-31

Step 4: Filter the results. Narrow your data using parameters such as:

• q: keywords in the title and content
• qInTitle: keywords in the title only
• qInMeta: keywords in the meta description
• country: for example country=in, us
• language: for example language=en,fr
• category: for example category=technology
• domain and prioritydomain: to focus on specific or top-ranked sources
• id: fetch specific articles by ID (up to 50 IDs in one request)

For the full list, read the News Archive endpoint guide or the documentation.

Step 5: Paginate through the results. Large date ranges return many articles, so use the nextPage value from each response in the page parameter of your next request to keep going.

Step 6: Export your data. Use the JSON response directly in your pipeline, or download the data in CSV or Excel for spreadsheet analysis.

“Download Historical News Data With Python”

NewsData.io has an official Python client. Install it with pip install newsdataapi, then:

python

from newsdataapiimportNewsDataApiClient

api = NewsDataApiClient(apikey=

response = api.archive_api(
q=’electric vehicle’,
from_date=’2025-01-01′,
to_date=’2025-03-31′,
language=’en’

)

print(response)

To loop through all pages of a large result set, pass scroll=True along with the page value from the previous response. For a full walkthrough, see How to use News API in Python.

Structured News data

Newsdata.io API collects all the available metadata related to the news articles provided by the publishers. All the metadata that collect about the news articles are mentioned below:

• Title- The title of the news article.
• Article link- Link to the news article on the web.
• Pub Date- The publish date of the news article.
• Author- The author of the news article.
• Publisher- The publisher’s domain name.
• Country- The country name of the publisher.
• Language- The language of the news article
• Description- The description of the news article.

Conclusion:

Downloading historical news data no longer needs manual searching or scraping. With NewsData.io’s Archive endpoint, you can query past news by date range, keyword, country, language and category, and export it as JSON, CSV or Excel. Choose a plan that matches the time period you need, test with the Count endpoint, and start downloading. You can also request historical news data here. If you are comparing providers, see our list of the best historical news APIs.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is historical news data?
Historical news data is the collection of articles published by media outlets in the past about events, topics or time periods, stored in a searchable and structured form.

2. How do I download historical news data?
Use a news API with an archive endpoint. With NewsData.io, call the archive endpoint with from_date and to_date, add filters, and download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel.

3. How far back does NewsData.io historical data go?
It depends on your plan: roughly 6 months on Basic, up to 2 years on Professional and up to 10 years on Corporate.

4. Is historical news data available on the free plan?
No. The archive endpoint needs a paid plan. See free vs paid news API for the differences.

5. Can I filter historical news by country, language or category?
Yes. The archive endpoint supports keyword, country, language, category, domain and priority domain filters alongside the date range.

6. In which formats can I get historical news data?
JSON through the API, and CSV or Excel when you download the data.