NewsAPI (newsapi.org) is a REST API that aggregates breaking news from thousands of publishers worldwide. It exposes a clean JSON endpoint you query with keywords, language, country and date range — and get back structured articles with titles, snippets, URLs and source metadata. AI Content Generator supports NewsAPI natively inside the Live News Mode panel: paste your API key in the Fonti Notizie settings section, pick NewsAPI as the source on a campaign, write a query, and every generation pulls fresh news to summarise.
This tutorial covers the full setup: how to sign up for NewsAPI, where to find the API key, how to paste it into the plugin, how to configure a NewsAPI query in Live News Mode, the cadence and dedup settings that produce clean coverage, and the operational tips for staying inside the free tier or the paid Business tier.
By the end you’ll have a campaign that fetches breaking news matching your keywords every 15–60 minutes, dedups against previous coverage and publishes AI-written summaries with the source cited — at a cost of $0 on the free tier or $10–$50/month on paid tiers depending on volume.
Why NewsAPI vs RSS
Both work with Live News Mode. NewsAPI has three advantages worth the extra configuration step. First, it aggregates from thousands of sources without you tracking down individual RSS URLs. Second, its metadata is cleaner and its freshness is faster (typically 5–15 minutes behind real publication vs 30–60 for RSS). Third, its query language is more expressive — AND/OR/NOT, quoted phrases, source allowlist/blocklist, country/language filters all in the query string.
The trade-off is cost. RSS is free forever; NewsAPI has a free tier capped at 100 requests/day (fine for testing, tight for production) and paid tiers starting at $449/year for commercial use. For serious news automation, NewsAPI usually pays for itself in reduced editorial workload; for casual blogging, RSS is enough.
Step 1 — Sign up for NewsAPI
Open newsapi.org/register. Fill the form with your name, email and a password. No credit card required for the free tier. You’ll receive a confirmation email; click the link to activate the account.
Immediately after activation you land on the account dashboard which shows your API key at the top of the page as a 32-character hex string. Copy it and paste it into a password manager under a clearly named entry (“NewsAPI key — my-site.com”). Like every other API key, treat it as sensitive; anyone with the key can query on your quota.
Step 2 — Paste the key into AI Content Generator Settings
In WordPress admin go to AI Content Generator → Settings. Scroll to the section titled 📰 Fonti Notizie (opzionali). It has two fields: API Key NewsAPI.org and API Key Tavily. Paste your NewsAPI key in the first field.
Click Save settings at the bottom of the page. The plugin runs a quick validation call to NewsAPI in the background. If the key is valid, no error is shown; if invalid or if the free-tier quota is empty, a red error appears with the exact NewsAPI response.
Step 3 — Open Live News Mode on a campaign
Create a new campaign or open an existing one. Scroll to the Live News Mode metabox and switch the toggle ON. Set News source to NewsAPI — this reveals the NewsAPI-specific fields: query, language, max news items and title preset.
Step 4 — Write a precise NewsAPI query
The NewsAPI query field is where most of the campaign’s quality is decided. Three rules for a good query.
- Use phrase quotes on the main keyword.
"WordPress"filters out drift words like “wordsmith”. - Combine with AND/OR.
"WordPress" AND ("plugin" OR "theme")narrows to plugin/theme news. - Use NOT to exclude noise.
"AI" AND "WordPress" NOT "shopify"excludes off-topic e-commerce mentions.
Test the query on NewsAPI’s own dashboard first (newsapi.org/docs/endpoints/everything) — paste the query, run it, look at the first 20 articles. If they’re on-topic, plug the same query into the plugin.
Step 5 — Set cadence and dedup
Below the query field, the Live News Mode panel exposes three cadence knobs.
- Max news items to fetch: 30–50 per poll. NewsAPI’s free tier caps you at 100/day; if you fetch 50 items twice a day, you’re inside the quota.
- Max posts per run: 3–5. Prevents flooding the site on a big news moment.
- News search window (hours): 24 for daily news, 4 for breaking news. Older items aren’t newsworthy anymore.
Pair these with Anti-duplicates in SEO brief (titles) — Fast or Strict, both work — so the same story doesn’t get published twice from different articles.
Step 6 — Pick a title preset that fits the tone
The Live News Mode panel has a Title preset dropdown with five options: Keep original, SEO optimised, Engaging, Formal, Question. For NewsAPI content, “SEO optimised” and “Engaging” usually outperform “Keep original” — NewsAPI’s titles are often ambiguous or clickbaity from the source publication, and rewriting them cleans up the tone.
Test all five presets on the same query for a couple of days and converge to whichever produces the highest CTR on your blog index page. The right preset is niche-dependent and audience-dependent.
Step 7 — Write the summary prompt in Extra AI instructions
NewsAPI returns headlines and snippets, not full articles. The AI expands them into your on-brand summary based on the Extra AI instructions you configure. A working template:
For every NewsAPI item:
- Open with the news in one paragraph (who, what, when).
- Expand with 2 paragraphs of context.
- End with an editorial paragraph from a {niche} reader's perspective.
- 400-600 words total.
- Cite the source publication and link to the original URL.
- Never invent quotes, statistics or dates.
Step 8 — Run a test fetch and inspect
Click Run news fetch now in the Live News Mode panel. The plugin makes one NewsAPI call, dedups against the last 7 days, and produces summaries for the top 3 matching items. Read them: are they on-topic, source-cited, factually accurate? Refine the query or the summary prompt based on what you see.
Managing the NewsAPI quota
Free tier: 100 requests/day. Each Live News Mode poll consumes 1 request. If you poll every 60 minutes, you use 24 requests/day and stay well inside the free tier. If you poll every 15 minutes, you use 96 requests/day — right at the limit.
To manage the quota, use the Interval field to space out polls (60 minutes = safe) or upgrade to the Business tier ($449/year) which lifts the daily cap to 250,000. For anything short of true news-media scale, the free tier or Developer tier ($99/year) is enough.
Troubleshooting
- “NewsAPI key invalid” — copied with whitespace or key was regenerated. Copy again from newsapi.org/account.
- “apiKeyExhausted” — hit the free tier limit. Wait 24 hours or upgrade.
- Empty queue after fetch — query too narrow. Broaden it or remove the language filter.
- Same story published from multiple sources — Anti-duplicates is off. Switch to Strict.
- Summaries feel too close to NewsAPI snippets — Extra AI instructions doesn’t ban verbatim copy. Add the rule.
You’re done
That’s the full NewsAPI integration: sign up at newsapi.org, paste the key into Settings → Fonti Notizie, enable Live News Mode on a campaign with News source: NewsAPI, write a precise query with AND/OR/NOT, configure cadence and dedup, run a test fetch and refine.
From here the campaign polls NewsAPI on the interval you defined, pulls fresh news matching your query, dedups against existing coverage, summarises through your AI provider and publishes into WordPress — automatically, on the cadence you set, at a cost that scales predictably with volume.