Mediastack API
50
AI ReadinessFoundational (C-)50/100
Agent-ready OpenAPI document · curated by JenticData EnrichmentData TransformationapiKey2 EndpointsREST
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For Agents
Search live and historical news articles by keyword, country, language, category, and source so an agent can ground its answers in current journalism.
Use for: Search for news about renewable energy in the last 24 hours, Find all articles about a company filed today in English, Retrieve the list of news sources available for the United Kingdom, Get the most recent business headlines from Germany
Not supported: Does not handle web crawling, social media posts, or full article-text licensing - use for structured news article search and source discovery only.
Jentic maintains a curated, agent-optimized OpenAPI specification for Mediastack API, validated against the live API. APILayer, which operates Mediastack, also publishes an official Mediastack OpenAPI document on SwaggerHub at `https://api.swaggerhub.com/apis/apilayer-863/MediastackAPI/1.0.0/swagger.json`; it describes the same two operations as ours, so the curated version is kept for agent tooling rather than substituted. Mediastack is a real-time and historical news data API that aggregates live news articles and headlines from over 7,500 sources across 50+ countries in 13 languages. The API exposes two endpoints: /news for searching articles by keywords, dates, languages, categories, countries, and sources, and /sources for listing available publishers. Use it to enrich agent answers with current news, build news dashboards, or feed content models with topical text.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the Mediastack API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Mediastack API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fmediastack.com%2Fmediastack" | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fmediastack.com%2Fmediastack" | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with Mediastack API.
Search news articles by free-text keyword across 7,500+ sources
Filter articles by ISO country code, language, and category such as business or technology
Page through historical news using date ranges and offset-limit pagination
List available news sources by language and country to discover what is searchable
Sort results with the sort parameter by published_desc, published_asc, or popularity
Restrict or exclude specific source IDs to control trust and bias in the article feed
Use Cases
Patterns agents use Mediastack API for, with concrete tasks.
★ Brand and Reputation Monitoring
Track every news mention of a brand, executive, or product across 7,500+ international sources without scraping individual outlets. Mediastack returns structured article objects with publication date, source, country, language, and a snippet, which makes it straightforward to dedupe coverage and roll up sentiment downstream. PR teams use this to flag emerging stories within minutes of publication.
Call /news with keywords=Acme Corp, languages=en, sort=published_desc, and date set to the current date in YYYY-MM-DD format, then return the article titles, sources, and URLs whose published_at falls in the last six hours.
AI Agent Grounding for Current Events
Give a research agent up-to-the-minute news context so its answers are not stuck at the model's training cutoff. The /news endpoint returns recent articles filtered by topic, language, and country, which the agent can summarise inline. This pattern lifts factuality on questions about ongoing events without exposing the agent to arbitrary web scraping.
Search Mediastack for keywords=climate summit and languages=en limited to the last 48 hours, then summarise the three most-cited stories with their source URLs.
Topical Content Curation
Feed a newsletter or internal briefing with curated articles by topic, country, and language without manually scanning each outlet. Mediastack's category filter (general, business, entertainment, health, science, sports, technology) and country filter let an agent assemble a tightly scoped reading list per audience segment. This compresses hours of editorial scanning into a single API call per audience.
Fetch business-category news for countries=us,gb in English published today, dedupe by URL, and return the top 10 by source authority for inclusion in the morning briefing.
Multilingual Market Intelligence
Search for industry signals in 13 languages so a market-intelligence agent does not miss non-English-language coverage of competitors and regulators. The /sources endpoint helps the agent confirm coverage in each market before searching, and /news returns articles tagged with language and country for downstream filtering. This is especially useful for regulated industries where regional press breaks news first.
Use /sources to list news sources for country=de language=de, then call /news with keywords=Bundeskartellamt and languages=de for the last seven days and return the unique sources covering it.
Key Endpoints
2 endpoints — jentic maintains a curated, agent-optimized openapi specification for mediastack api, validated against the live api.
METHOD
PATH
DESCRIPTION
GET
/news
Search live and historical news articles
GET
/sources
List available news sources
GET
/news
Search live and historical news articles
GET
/sources
List available news sources
Jentic AI Readiness Score
This API is usable in Jentic One now. Its AI-readiness score against Jentic's framework shows where it stands today and where improvements would make it even easier for agents to use.
M
Mediastack API
- Foundational (C-)50/100
93
Foundational Compliance69
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility54
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience94
Agent Usability15
Security100
AI DiscoverabilityPowered by JenticScoring Framework 1.0.0 | Scoring Engine 0.4.0
Show dimension breakdown
93
Foundational Compliance
Base layer of spec validity and structural soundness.
Grade: A+Signals: 4
99%
Lint Results
Aggregated quality score from linter diagnostics, weighted by severity.
100%
Resolution Completeness
Percentage of `$ref` references that resolve successfully.
100%
Specification Validity
Checks whether the API description parses successfully and conforms to its declared specification (e.g., OpenAPI).
75%
Structural Integrity
Structural correctness score based on schema issues using logarithmic dampening.
69
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility
Clarity, completeness, and ingestion readiness for developers and tooling.
Grade: B+Signals: 4
0%
Example Density
How richly the API is illustrated with examples.
100%
Example Validity
Percentage of examples that conform to their schemas.
75%
Response Coverage
Percentage of operations with complete response definitions (success, client error, server error).
100%
Tooling Readiness
Health of API ingestion, bundling, and resolution within Jentic pipelines.
54
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience
Semantic breadth, depth, and agent comprehension for AI systems.
Grade: CSignals: 4
67%
Description Coverage
Coverage of descriptions across API elements.
0%
Error Standardization
Coverage of RFC 9457 Problem Details for error responses.
100%
OperationId Quality
Coverage, uniqueness, and casing consistency of operationIds for AI inference.
50%
Summary Coverage
Coverage of summaries across operations/tags/info.
94
Agent Usability
Functional utility, complexity comfort, and AI orchestration readiness.
Grade: A+Signals: 1
94%
Complexity Comfort
Agent comfort level based on API operational and structural complexity.
15
Security
Trust, risk posture, and security compliance.
Grade: FSignals: 1
15%
Authentication Strength
Average quality of security schemes based on authentication method strength (weakest link for OAuth2).
100
AI Discoverability
Findability, semantic richness, and reasoning readiness.
Grade: A+Signals: 1
100%
Descriptive Richness
Clarity and depth of descriptions across API elements.
Score it yourself
Every API in the directory is allowlisted, so you can re-score it with no key required.
npx @jentic/api-scorecard-cli score <openapi-url>Why Jentic?
What agents get from Jentic-routed access to this vendor.
Setup
Wiring the Mediastack API by hand means sending your access_key as a query parameter, pointing at the api.mediastack.com/v1 host, and mapping the news and sources calls yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import the Mediastack API from the API Directory, store the access key once, and your agent calls it.
Permission scoping
Mediastack filters news and sources through query parameters rather than resource ids in the URL path, so you limit the agent to the operations it needs, such as searching news or discovering sources. It calls only the operations you allow, and since this surface is read-only, it retrieves articles without any write access.
Credential isolation
Your Mediastack access_key is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected as the query parameter at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'find recent news about a topic', and Jentic returns the matching Mediastack news operation with its parameter schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using Mediastack API through Jentic.
Is there a Mediastack MCP server?
You do not need an MCP server to give your agent Mediastack. Jentic connects it directly from the API Directory: import Mediastack, store your access key once, and your agent can search news articles and list sources without loading another server's tool definitions into its context.
What authentication does the Mediastack API use?
Mediastack uses an API key passed as the access_key query parameter. Through Jentic the key is stored encrypted in the vault and injected at execution time, so the agent never sees the raw value.
Can I retrieve historical news articles with the Mediastack API?
Yes, on a paid plan. The /news endpoint accepts a date filter that takes either a single date or a comma-separated range, and Mediastack's pricing page lists Historical Data on the Standard, Professional, Business and Enterprise plans but not on Free. The Free plan card lists Delayed News Data, so the free plan returns neither historical articles nor live ones.
What are the rate limits for the Mediastack API?
Volume is tied to plan. Mediastack's pricing page lists the Free plan at 100 calls per month, Standard at 10,000, Professional at 50,000 and Business at 250,000, with custom Enterprise volume on request. HTTPS encryption is listed on every plan including Free, while live news data and historical data begin at Standard, so check your plan before scaling agent calls.
How do I search news for a topic through Jentic?
Search Jentic for search news articles, load the schema for the /news operation, and execute with keywords, languages, and date parameters. Jentic returns the article list with title, source, URL, and published_at fields ready for the agent to summarise.
Which languages and countries does Mediastack cover?
Mediastack covers 13 languages including English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, sourced from publishers across more than 50 countries. Use /sources with the languages and countries filters to enumerate exactly which publishers are available before searching.
Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Mediastack API?
Yes. Because you run Jentic One yourself, your own rules decide which Mediastack operations and credentials the agent may use, so you can allow only the calls it needs, such as searching news with /news or listing publishers with /sources. Mediastack filters requests through query parameters rather than resource IDs in the URL path, and the whole surface is read-only, so a scoped agent retrieves articles and sources without any write access. The agent calls only the operations you permit and nothing else.
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