Sowetan API, RSS and sitemap
Every article Sowetan publishes, as JSON, through an open API with no key and no signup. 3,416 of their articles are indexed right now, refreshed hourly.
South AfricaEnglish#1,147 by volume
Four ways to pull sowetan.co.za
All four are ours, all four are live, and none of them needs a key.
JSON Search this publisher
Every article we hold from sowetan.co.za, newest first. Add q= to search inside.
curl -s "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?host=www.sowetan.co.za&size=20"open it →RSS Subscribe in any reader
The same articles as an RSS 2.0 feed. Works in Feedly, Inoreader, Thunderbird — anywhere.
curl -s "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/rss?host=www.sowetan.co.za&size=50"open it →JSON Feed For apps
JSON Feed 1.1, the same content in a format apps parse natively.
curl -s "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/feed.json?host=www.sowetan.co.za&size=50"open it →Trimmed For agents
Only the fields an agent needs — title, url, date, language — so the response stays small.
curl -s "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?host=www.sowetan.co.za&size=20&fields=title,url,published_at,lang"open it →Call the API
A live request. Paste it into a terminal and Sowetan headlines come back as JSON.
curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?host=www.sowetan.co.za&size=5"Publishing volume
Articles per day over the last 90 days. The busiest hour is 03:00 UTC — that is when the newsroom pushes its main batch.
The 1 hatched days are gaps in the upstream news archive, not quiet days at Sowetan: the whole corpus dips on those dates. They are excluded from the median above.
curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/stats?host=www.sowetan.co.za&top=10"Publishing rhythm
When Sowetan actually publishes, by hour of day (UTC) and by day of week — measured from 3,416 timestamps, not from a schedule they advertise.
Languages
| Code | Language | Articles | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
en | English | 3,416 | 100.0% |
Latest articles
The 18 most recent Sowetan articles in the index — the same rows the API returns, rendered for humans.
Harvest it all
Page through the archive by date. from and to accept
YYYY-MM-DD or relative values such as now-7d.
curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?host=www.sowetan.co.za&from=now-7d&size=100"To poll for new material, keep the timestamp of the newest article you saw and ask only for what came after it:
curl "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?host=www.sowetan.co.za&from=now-1h&sort=date_asc"Article bodies come with full_text=true. No key, no quota tier, no
header — see the search endpoint for every parameter.
Metadata quality
How well Sowetan marks up its own pages — useful if you are deciding whether to parse them yourself.
Crawl lag — the delay between publication and the article reaching this index — is 83 min at the median, 203 minutes at the 90th percentile.
Similar publishers
Comparable outlets in the same language. Those without a page here yet link straight to their slice of the API.
FAQ
Does Sowetan have an official API?
Not a public one. This endpoint is the practical alternative: their articles as structured JSON, with title, lead, publication time, section, byline and a link back to the original.
How do I get their RSS feed?
Most publishers expose one at /rss or /feed, but feeds carry
only the last few dozen items and drop them within hours. This index keeps 3,416 of
their articles and lets you filter by date, language and section.
How many articles does Sowetan publish per day?
40 on a median day, measured across 90 days.
Can I use this commercially?
The API is free and unauthenticated. What you may do with the content is between you and the publisher: we return metadata, a lead paragraph and a link, not a licence.
