NYT Archive API

Name: NYT Archive API API
Brand: Archive API
Availability: InStock

✓ Official Vendor SpecMediaContent DeliveryapiKey1 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Retrieve a complete month of New York Times article metadata going back to 1851 from a single year/month endpoint, authenticated with an API key in the query string.

Quickstart

Get started with NYT Archive API in minutes using your preferred integration method.

# Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf)
{
  "jentic": {
    "url": "https://api.jentic.com/mcp",
    "auth": "oauth"
  }
}

# Then ask your agent:
"list NYT articles for a given month"

# → Jentic returns the GET /events tool with parameter schema, agent executes.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with NYT Archive API API.

Retrieve every NYT article published in a given month with full metadata

Build a local mirror of NYT article metadata back to September 1851

Construct a longitudinal corpus by walking month-by-month from a chosen start year

Extract section, byline, and keyword data from each article record

GET STARTED

Start building with NYT Archive API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Use for: Get every NYT article published in a specific month and year, Retrieve all articles from January 1900 for a research project, Build a local copy of NYT article metadata for the 1960s, List articles published by The New York Times in March 1969

Not supported: Does not handle full-text query, real-time alerts, or article body retrieval — use for monthly metadata bulk download only.

The New York Times Archive API returns the complete list of NYT articles published in a given month, going back to September 1851. Each response is a month's worth of article metadata — headlines, abstracts, bylines, sections, keywords, and links — making it the canonical bulk-retrieval endpoint for NYT content. The API exposes a single GET path keyed by year and month, which is intentionally the simplest possible surface for building local mirrors of NYT metadata, training corpora, longitudinal analysis sets, and timelines.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use NYT Archive API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Historical News Corpus Build

Mirror NYT article metadata month by month into a local store to support research on language change, topic prevalence, or named entities over time. The single /year/month.json endpoint returns the full month in one response, which keeps the build script simple and easy to resume. Setup takes a few hours, with the bulk of the work being respectful pacing of requests.

Walk years 1900 through 2020 and call GET /{year}/{month}.json for each, writing the response JSON to local storage for later analysis.

On This Day Feature

Build an 'on this day' module for a website or newsletter that surfaces NYT headlines from the same date in past years. The Archive API returns the full month, so a worker can preselect dates and cache the relevant entries. This provides richer historical context than scraped sources because the metadata is canonical and includes section and byline information.

GET /{year}/{month}.json for the current month minus 50 years, filter to today's date, and return the top three headlines.

Agent-Driven Historical Research

Let an AI agent answer 'what was The New York Times reporting in October 1962?' by calling the Archive API for that month and summarising the headlines. Through Jentic, the agent searches by intent and gets only the operations it needs, with the API key held in the platform's vault rather than in the agent's context.

Search Jentic for 'list NYT articles for a given month', load the operation, and summarise the top headlines from October 1962.

Key Endpoints

1 endpoints — the new york times archive api returns the complete list of nyt articles published in a given month, going back to september 1851.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

GET

/{year}/{month}.json

Retrieve all NYT articles published in the given month

GET

/{year}/{month}.json

Retrieve all NYT articles published in the given month

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

The NYT api-key is stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents receive scoped access — the raw key never enters the agent's context, and Jentic appends it as a query parameter at execution time.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search Jentic with phrases like 'list NYT articles for a given month' and Jentic returns the matching operation with its input schema, so the agent can call the correct endpoint without browsing the developer docs.

Time to first call

Direct integration: 2-3 hours for query-string auth, pagination, and rate-limit pacing. Through Jentic: under 30 minutes — search, load, execute.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Complementary

NYT Article Search API

Query-based search across the same NYT corpus with filters and facets, complementing month-bulk archive retrieval.

Use when the goal is targeted query rather than full month retrieval.

Complementary

NYT Most Popular API

Returns most-emailed, most-shared, and most-viewed NYT articles for the current period.

Use for current trending content rather than historical archive walks.

Alternative

Guardian Content API

Search and retrieve articles from The Guardian's archive — alternative source for cross-publication news research.

Choose The Guardian when the research question requires a non-NYT or UK-centred newspaper of record.

Alternative

NewsAPI

Aggregator across many publications with shorter retention than the NYT archive.

Choose NewsAPI for cross-publisher recent-news coverage rather than deep historical archives.

FAQs

Specific to using NYT Archive API API through Jentic.

What authentication does the NYT Archive API use?

The API uses an API key passed as a query parameter named 'api-key'. There is no header-based auth and no OAuth flow. Through Jentic, the api-key is stored encrypted in the vault and appended to every request URL at execution time so the agent never holds it directly.

How far back does the archive go?

Coverage starts in September 1851. You can request any year and month from then forward, and the response contains every article The New York Times published that month with its metadata.

What are the rate limits for the NYT Archive API?

The spec does not embed explicit limits. The Times's published policy is 5 requests per minute and 500 per day for the developer tier; back off on HTTP 429 and pace bulk-archive walks accordingly.

How do I retrieve a month of articles through Jentic?

Run pip install jentic, then search for 'list NYT articles for a given month'. Jentic returns GET /{year}/{month}.json with its input schema; supply the year and month and execute. Sign up at https://app.jentic.com/sign-up to get an agent key.

Does the Archive API return article body text?

No — the response includes metadata (headlines, abstracts, bylines, keywords, section, URL) rather than full body text. Use the URL field to link out to the article on nytimes.com for the full text.