GDELT alternative: scored, classified news via a simple API

GDELT is a remarkable open dataset, but using it means wrangling a massive, raw event firehose — heavy schemas, batch files, and your own enrichment on top. If you want news that's already scored, classified and queryable over a simple API, here's how NewsAgent Data compares.

What GDELT is great at — and where it's heavy

GDELT excels at global, academic-scale event data going back years. The trade-off is operational: huge volumes, a complex event taxonomy, quarter-hourly batch files, and machine-translated coverage where you supply the relevance judgement. For real-time product monitoring, that's a lot of pipeline to own.

A simpler, enriched alternative

• Already scored & classified — urgency (0–10), 9-category political lean, topic / country / audience tags on every article.
• De-duplicated — one event, one cluster_id, with cluster_size for spread.
• Simple REST — a single /v1/feed or /v1/breaking call with query params; JSON back, no batch downloads.
• Depth where it counts — deep Russian + English coverage plus 2,600+ live Telegram channels that event datasets miss.

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://api.newsagentdata.com/v1/breaking?country=ru&min_score=7&days=1"

Push delivery

Instead of polling batch files, register a webhook and high-urgency items arrive within ~60 seconds, HMAC-signed. That turns a monitoring pipeline into a few lines of config.

Which to choose

For longitudinal, global academic research, GDELT is hard to beat. For a real-time product that needs scored, labelled, de-duplicated news — especially Russian/English with Telegram — a focused API is faster to ship on. See the full news API comparison and the coverage map.