Every article The South African publishes, as JSON, through an open API with
no key and no signup. 5,457 of their articles are indexed right now, refreshed
hourly.
South AfricaEnglish#1,446 by volume
Four ways to pull thesouthafrican.com
All four are ours, all four are live, and none of them needs a key.
JSON Search this publisher
Every article we hold from thesouthafrican.com, newest first. Add q= to search inside.
curl -s "https://freenewsapi.ai/v1/search?host=www.thesouthafrican.com&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.thesouthafrican.com&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.thesouthafrican.com&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.thesouthafrican.com&size=20&fields=title,url,published_at,lang"open it →
Call the API
A live request. Paste it into a terminal and The South African headlines come back as JSON.
Articles per day over the last 89 days. The busiest hour is 08:00 UTC — that is when the newsroom pushes its main batch.
The 29 hatched days are gaps in the upstream news archive, not quiet days at The South African: the whole corpus dips on those dates. They are excluded from the median above.
When The South African actually publishes, by hour of day (UTC) and by day of week —
measured from 5,457 timestamps, not from a schedule they advertise.
Sections
Sections come from the publisher's own markup, present on 100% of their articles.
2026-10-22 19:19 UTC · news · Tarryn-Leigh Solomons
Suliman Carrim's legal troubles are mounting as a fresh criminal case emerges. Two vehicles, disputed documents and a border crossing are now at the centre of the investi
2026-10-22 15:36 UTC · premier soccer league · Siseko Gwegwe
Betway Premiership giants Orlando Pirates are home to three highly talented youngsters nicknamed Messi. Meet Jacob Serman, Khumoetsile Van Schalkwyk, and Ofentse Moeletsi
Homebuyers comparing property prices in Southern Africa may find significant differences between the markets in South Africa and Botswana, particularly when looking at ad
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 5,457 of
their articles and lets you filter by date, language and section.
How many articles does The South African publish per day?
65 on a median day, measured across 89 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.
