NewsBeat

NewsBeat is an open-source service that gives AI agents source-linked news on US-listed equities and crypto assets. It is reachable through a hosted MCP endpoint and a REST API, and public reads are free during early access with no API key required. The project is MIT licensed and published at newsbeat.dev.

What It Is

NewsBeat works as a news context layer for agents doing trading research, prediction-market analysis, personal briefings, or monitoring. An agent supplies an asset and a cursor and gets back either new headlines or a clear answer that nothing changed. Each item carries a headline, publisher, timestamp, and a link to the original reporting. Full article bodies are not included.

It supplies news context only. It does not execute trades, provide prediction-market prices, or connect to Polymarket accounts.

How the Change-Tracking Loop Works

The agent picks an asset, reads a baseline, saves the cursor, and later asks what changed. Stories arrive in packs of up to eight, and a watch call can check up to 50 assets in one request. Ingestion runs every 15 minutes, and responses report per-asset freshness so an agent can tell a quiet topic from stale coverage.

The README documents six tools over MCP and REST:

• newsbeat_topics finds supported assets and inspects coverage.
• newsbeat_news reads headlines with sources, timestamps, and a cursor.
• newsbeat_changes returns items indexed since the last cursor.
• newsbeat_brief returns the top three headlines verbatim.
• newsbeat_stories groups similar headlines into approximate story clusters.
• newsbeat_watch checks up to 50 assets at once.

Coverage and Grouping

The catalog covers 2,030 assets: 1,528 US equities and 502 cryptos. Story grouping is conservative and approximate. It uses a 24-hour window and headline overlap, and it can miss paraphrases or group unrelated reports. Publisher counts measure coverage, not independent verification.

Setup Path

A first request needs only curl against the public API. MCP clients that support remote Streamable HTTP can add the hosted endpoint. Function-calling agents can load tool schemas from the tools endpoint. The code can also be run locally with Node.js 22 or 24 and npm, though news reads require a PostgreSQL database and a cursor-signing secret.

Current Status

The project is in free early access. NewsBeat does not push alerts on its own, so recurring checks depend on a scheduler in the assistant or a separate workflow. The roadmap lists Telegram and Discord relays, more integrations, and publisher URLs in place of Google News redirects.