Chronicling America vs New York Times

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.

The NYT Developer Network exposes ten separate APIs (Article Search, Top Stories, Books, Most Popular, and more) over a shared API-key scheme, all returning JSON. Registration and usage are completely free, but the terms restrict every API to non-commercial projects only — selling access, running ads, or shipping the data inside a paid product all require a separate licensing deal through NYT Licensing.