NewsMCP documentation

Quickstart

Nothing to install and no signup. Point any MCP client at the hosted endpoint:

https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp

Streamable HTTP, stateless — no initialize handshake or session id required. Keyless works immediately; a key raises the limits (see Access and limits) and is free to get at platform.newsmcp.com/auth — sign up, no waitlist.

Claude Code

Keyless:

claude mcp add --transport http newsmcp https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp

With a key:

claude mcp add --transport http newsmcp https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp \
  --header "x-api-key: <your-key>"

Claude Desktop — add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart:

Keyless:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsmcp": { "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp" }
  }
}

With a key — Desktop's config has no headers field, so pass it in the URL:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsmcp": { "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp?apiKey=<your-key>" }
  }
}

Cursor — add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json, or use the one-click deeplink below:

Keyless:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsmcp": { "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp" }
  }
}

With a key:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "newsmcp": {
      "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "<your-key>" }
    }
  }
}

cursor://anysphere.cursor-deeplink/mcp/install?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmcp.newsmcp.com%2Fmcp&name=newsmcp

VS Code — add to .vscode/mcp.json in your workspace:

Keyless:

{
  "servers": {
    "newsmcp": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp" }
  }
}

With a key:

{
  "servers": {
    "newsmcp": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.newsmcp.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "<your-key>" }
    }
  }
}

Any other MCP client — including OpenAI's Responses API connectors and other hosts that speak streamable HTTP — needs only the URL above; add a key with whichever method its config supports, from the table below.

Adding a key#

Get a key at platform.newsmcp.com/auth.

Events, not articles

A search does not return a flat list of articles. It returns events: every article covering the same story is grouped into one of them.

A widely covered story therefore arrives as a single object rather than a hundred near-identical rows, and the corroboration counts become the useful signal:

min_sources counts domains with mirrors included — a site that only republished someone else's copy still counts. min_newsrooms excludes them. When you want "is this a real story", newsrooms is the stronger signal.

Article body text is never returned. sources carries links; follow them to the publisher.

Tools

news is the general surface — a topic, a filter, or a bare call for the most-corroborated recent stories. For a named company, person or place, use its subject parameter rather than q: it quotes the name so it matches as a phrase and widens the window to 30 days. Both matter — q=Bank of America unquoted returns "India Now Asia's Least Preferred Stock Market" first, and q=Monzo over the default 24 hours returns nothing. check_coverage answers a different question again — not "what happened" but "is this real", reporting independent newsrooms separately from syndicated reprints.

Upstream clustering is currently siloed by language, so one story can appear as several events with different generated headlines. check_coverage totals those variants and shows what it combined.

Parameters

Each tool below takes only the parameters listed for it — passing one from a different tool is rejected, not ignored.

news#

q is rewritten before it runs. A conversational question used to come back empty — what is happening with Iran and sanctions returned nothing, because a mid-query and makes the engine treat what, is and with as required terms, and happening is a required term either way. Filler like that is now dropped, so the same words return results. Quoted phrases, acronyms in caps, and capitalised names are left alone, and if trimming would be ambiguous the query is sent exactly as you wrote it.

Any rewrite is reported: markdown and text replies carry a leading Note: line, and in json the query that actually ran is in applied_filters.search_text. This is an MCP-only convenience — the REST endpoint searches the string you give it.

get_story#

check_coverage#

check_limits#

check_health#

No parameters.

Taxonomy

Three independent axes. event_type is what happened, content_type is the form the writing takes, sector is the industry. Each accepts a comma-separated list for an OR match, and each rejects a value outside its set — the error names every accepted value, so a wrong guess is self-correcting.

event_type#

60 leaves across 22 families.

content_type#

sector#

Response shape

Every tool's reply lives in one place: content[0].text. There is no structuredContent to inspect instead.

If you intend to parse the result, pass response_format: "json" — don't regex the markdown digest.

A news or get_story event in json looks like this:

{
  "event_id": "evt_1847a4931a6c8002",
  "headline": "White House summons AI labs after models go rogue",
  "one_liner": "Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google were invited to a closed-door briefing.",
  "abstract": "Following a string of high-profile model failures, the White House ...",
  "event_type": "legal_regulatory.regulatory_action",
  "sector": "software_it_services",
  "content_type": "news_report",
  "size": 125,
  "source_count": 41,
  "newsrooms": 18,
  "first_seen": "2026-08-20T09:12:00",
  "last_seen": "2026-08-24T11:03:00",
  "entities": [{"name": "OpenAI"}, {"name": "Anthropic"}],
  "sources": ["https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/...", "https://apnews.com/article/..."]
}

event_id is derived from cluster membership, so the same story can carry a different id on a later search — don't store it.

Access and limits

Read your own ceilings with check_limits — it is exempt from metering, so asking costs nothing and is the only number worth trusting, including against this table.

Asking for more than a plan allows behaves in three different ways, and the difference matters when you are debugging an empty result.

Keyless narrows and says so. The search runs against the reduced window and the response carries notices naming every value it changed — surfaced as a leading Note (keyless): line in a markdown/text reply, or a notices array in json.

A keyed plan asked for a window beyond its lookback returns nothing, quietly. Measured on the free tier: a from_ 30 days back against a 14-day plan comes back with no events and no notice. It reads as "no news matched" rather than "outside your plan" — call check_limits before concluding the index is empty.

limit above what the plan allows is a hard error, not a narrowing — the message names the caller's real ceiling.

Every plan, keyless included, carries a full commercial licence. Keys are self-serve at platform.newsmcp.com/auth.

Troubleshooting

Example asks

You rarely name a tool or its parameters directly. These are all valid things to say to an MCP-capable client, with what each one resolves to: