The Scenario
Your agency handles PR for a consumer brand, and every Friday you send the client a coverage report covering ten specific publications — the outlets they've told you they actually care about. Everything else is noise.
This week, the person who was building that report went on leave. You inherited an Excel workbook with a list of News API source IDs in Sheet2 and a half-finished Sheet1 with column headers but no data.
The instructions say "just run the query." The instructions don't say how.
The bad version:
- Take the source IDs from Sheet2 column A, comma-join them into a sources parameter string
- Construct the full News API /everything endpoint URL with the brand name keyword and the source IDs
- Call it, get the JSON response, pick out the relevant fields, and paste title, source, and URL into Sheet1 row by row
- Do this every Friday without making any mistakes in the parameter string
A weekly coverage report for a client should not involve manually assembling URL query strings. The moment you transpose two characters in a source ID, you get zero results and spend twenty minutes figuring out why.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads both worksheets, uses the source IDs from Sheet2 to scope the query, and writes the coverage results into Sheet1 — without you touching a URL.
Using the source IDs listed in column A of Sheet2, search News API for articles mentioning "Meridian Skincare" from those sources published in the last 7 days and write each article's title, source name, and URL into columns A, B, and C of Sheet1
What You Get
- Sheet1 column A: article headline
- Sheet1 column B: source name matching the outlet in Sheet2
- Sheet1 column C: direct article URL
- Results scoped only to the source IDs you specified — no off-target outlets
- Articles sorted by published date descending
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The source IDs in Sheet2 include some that are inactive or incorrect
Using the source IDs in Sheet2 column A, search News API for any article mentioning "Meridian Skincare" in the last 30 days; for each source ID that returns zero results, flag it with "NO RESULTS" in Sheet2 column B
You want the article count per outlet alongside the article list
Search News API for "Meridian Skincare" using the sources in Sheet2 column A, write all results into Sheet1 columns A through C, then write a summary in Sheet2 column C showing how many articles each source produced this week
Some outlet names in Sheet2 don't match the source IDs
Pull the source name for each ID in Sheet2 column A from News API and write it into Sheet2 column B so I can verify each ID matches the right publication
Pull, count, and flag low coverage in one shot
Using the source IDs in Sheet2, search News API for "Meridian Skincare" articles from the last 7 days; write all results into Sheet1 columns A through C sorted newest first, then write the article count per source into Sheet2 column C and flag any source with zero results in column D with "MISSING COVERAGE"
Knowing which outlets mentioned you — and which didn't — is the actual deliverable. This prompt produces both.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook where you keep your publication source IDs, then ask it to run this week's brand search and populate the coverage report. For the step that builds your source ID list, see building a News API source reference sheet. Full overview: News API + Excel.