CNN Top Headlines Scraper

This Apify actor scrapes the latest top news headlines from CNN (https://www.cnn.com/) or CNN International (https://edition.cnn.com/). It can optionally extract full article details.

Key Features

• Extracts real-time headlines from the CNN homepage or specific section pages.
• Optionally follows links to scrape full article content, author, and publish date.
• Outputs structured JSON data for easy processing or analysis.

How to Use

Configure your actor run using the input fields below. The main options are:

• startUrls (array): The URLs to start scraping from (e.g., the homepage or a section like World or Business). Defaults to ["https://www.cnn.com/"].
• maxHeadlines (integer): The maximum number of headlines to extract and visit. Default is 20.
• includeArticleDetails (boolean): When set to true, the actor will visit each headline link and scrape the full article text, author, and published date. Default is false.

Example Input

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://edition.cnn.com/" }
  ],
  "maxHeadlines": 10,
  "includeArticleDetails": true
}

Input & Output

Input Schema

Refer to .actor/input_schema.json for the complete specification.

Output Format

Results are saved to the default Apify dataset, available for download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Headline-only output:

{
  "title": "Superman smashes box office expectations",
  "url": "https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/13/entertainment/superman-box-office-intl",
  "source": "CNN",
  "scrapedAt": "2025-07-13T12:56:40.535Z"
}

Output with article details (when includeArticleDetails is true):

{
  "title": "Superman smashes box office expectations",
  "content": "Full article text ...",
  "author": "CNN Staff",
  "publishedDate": "2025-07-13T10:00:00Z",
  "url": "https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/13/entertainment/superman-box-office-intl",
  "source": "CNN",
  "scrapedAt": "2025-07-13T12:56:40.535Z"
}

How It Works

1. The actor loads the provided startUrls.
2. It extracts up to maxHeadlines news headlines from those pages.
3. If includeArticleDetails is enabled, it navigates to each headline's URL to scrape the article body, author, and publication date.
4. All results are stored in the dataset.

Important Notes

• Terms of Service: Use this actor responsibly and in compliance with CNN's terms and robots.txt.
• Rate Limiting: Avoid aggressive request rates to prevent overloading servers.
• Proxies: Consider using proxies for large-scale scraping to avoid IP blocking.
• Data Usage: Ensure you have the right to use scraped data for your intended purpose.
• Scope: The actor only scrapes publicly accessible CNN articles.

Legal Disclaimer

This tool is for educational and research purposes. You are responsible for using it in a legal and responsible manner that does not harm CNN's infrastructure.

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