Chronicling America vs Mediastack

Chronicling America is the Library of Congress's searchable archive of historic U.S. newspaper pages published through 1963, built from the National Digital Newspaper Program. As of August 2025 its data moved fully onto the general loc.gov JSON/YAML API, retiring the old chroniclingamerica.loc.gov endpoints in favor of structured search, batch, and full-text access — no API key is required, though heavy use should self-throttle.

mediastack (now operated under APILayer) aggregates live and historical news and blog articles from thousands of worldwide sources into a single JSON REST endpoint keyed by an access_key parameter. Its free plan is capped at 100 calls/month with delayed news data and HTTP-only access — HTTPS, real-time delivery, and historical search all require moving to a paid Standard plan or higher.