The Scenario
A communications researcher at a policy think-tank handed you a project last month: how did English-language media coverage of "electric vehicles" shift across Q1 2024? Your deliverable is a month-by-month breakdown with top sources and total article counts.
You've been putting it off because "pull historical data from a news API" sounds like an afternoon of API calls, JSON wrangling, and Excel pivots.
It is, if you do it the manual way.
The bad version:
- Call the News API /everything endpoint three times — once per month, with the right fromDate and toDate parameters
- Download or copy each response, extract title, source, and publishedAt fields from however many article objects came back
- Paste all three months into the same sheet, add a "Month" column manually, then run a COUNTIF or pivot table to get the monthly breakdown
Historical research pulls have a way of revealing edge cases — the source that published forty articles in January and zero in February, the date range that returns a partial page — that add thirty minutes of cleanup to every query.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, calls News API with the right date range parameters, and writes the structured results back — including the summary table.
Search News API for all articles about "electric vehicles" published between 2024-01-01 and 2024-03-31 from English-language sources and write each article's title, source name, URL, and published date into columns A through D in Sheet1
What You Get
- Column A: article headline
- Column B: source domain or name
- Column C: article URL
- Column D: published date in YYYY-MM-DD format
- All matching articles across the full date range, paginated automatically
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need a month-by-month article count from the raw data
From the articles in Sheet1 column D (published dates), count the total articles per calendar month and write the results into Sheet2 with Month in column A (formatted as YYYY-MM) and Article Count in column B
Some rows have missing or malformed dates
In Sheet1 column D, identify any rows where the published date is missing or not in YYYY-MM-DD format and flag them with "CHECK" in column E
You want the top 10 sources by volume across the full quarter
From the articles in Sheet1 column B, count how many articles each source published across the full date range and list the top 10 sources by count in Sheet2 columns D and E with Source in D and Count in E
Full research pipeline in one prompt
Search News API for "electric vehicles" articles from 2024-01-01 to 2024-03-31 in English, write all results into Sheet1 with title, source, URL, and published date in columns A through D, then build a summary in Sheet2 showing article count per month in rows 1 through 3 and top 10 sources by volume below that
This is the kind of pull that used to take a researcher an afternoon. Here it's one instruction.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet where you're tracking a research topic, then ask it to pull the historical News API archive for your date range and build the coverage summary inline. For adjacent workflows, see how to run multi-keyword content gap research or monitor specific outlets. Full overview: News API + Google Sheets.