# NewsBeat

> Open-source news layer for AI agents that delivers source-linked equity and crypto headlines and change tracking over MCP and REST.

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.

## Features
- Source-linked equity and crypto headlines
- Cursor-based change tracking since last check
- Hosted MCP server and REST API
- OpenAI-compatible function-calling tool schemas
- Batch watch of up to 50 assets per request
- Top-three headline briefs
- Approximate story clustering of similar headlines
- Per-asset freshness reporting
- Ingestion refreshed every 15 minutes
- Web terminal for exploring live news
- MIT-licensed open source code

## Integrations
MCP, REST API, OpenAI-compatible tools, Google News, PostgreSQL, Vercel

## Platforms
WEB, API

## Pricing
Open Source, Free tier available

## Links
- Website: https://newsbeat.dev
- Documentation: https://www.newsbeat.dev/docs
- Repository: https://github.com/thepeternemec/NewsBeat
- EveryDev.ai: https://www.everydev.ai/tools/newsbeat