Free News Datasets

Open news data for machine learning, NLP, and sentiment analysis — provided free by Newsdata.io.

A curated collection of free, downloadable news datasets covering business, sports, entertainment, health, science and technology, world politics, crypto and blockchain, US politics and diplomacy, AI regulation, global conflict, COVID-19, the Ukraine–Russia war, and major sporting events including the FIFA World Cup 2026, IPL 2026 and the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026 — aggregated from reliable publishers across many languages and countries. Each archive ships in both CSV and JSON, with rich metadata and AI-extracted annotations (ai_tag, ai_region, ai_org, sentiment) so you can skip the preprocessing and get straight to your model.

Use them as ready-made news corpora for:

• Machine learning — text classification, clustering, embeddings, LLM fine-tuning
• Natural language processing (NLP) — named entity recognition, topic modelling, summarization
• Sentiment analysis — labelled sentiment + per-sentiment confidence stats out of the box
• Trend analysis — surface what publishers are covering across time
• News aggregation and search demos
• Geopolitical and regional analytics — ai_region / ai_org enrichments included
• Journalism and academic research

Available datasets

Every archive expands to a folder containing the same dataset in CSV and JSON form.

Article counts and sizes below match the catalogue on newsdata.io/datasets.

Topical and event datasets

Dataset	File	Articles	Size
FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament coverage	FIFA World Cup 2026.zip	14,586	~38 MB
IPL 2026 player performance and match analysis	NewsData.io_IPL.zip	33,364	~58 MB
ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026	icc_mens_t20_world_cup_2026_news_dataset.zip	5,867	~12 MB
Crypto and blockchain	crypto_blockchain_news.zip	19,423	~96 MB
US politics and diplomacy	us_politics_and_diplomacy.zip	23,804	~81 MB
Global geopolitics and conflict	Global Geopolitics & Conflict News Dataset.zip	2,113	~11 MB
AI regulation and governance	ai_regulation_governance.zip	1,500	~9 MB
Ukraine–Russia conflict	Ukraine_News.zip	8,678	~5 MB
COVID-19	Covid_News.zip	4,234	~9 MB
COVID-19 and vaccines	Covid_and_Vaccine_News.zip	4,383	~9 MB

Category datasets

Dataset	File	Articles	Size
Business	Business_News.zip	8,829	~17 MB
Sports	Sports_News.7z	19,535	~31 MB
Entertainment	Entertainment_News.zip	8,532	~16 MB
Science and technology	Science_Technology_News.zip	5,437	~12 MB
Health	Health_News.zip	2,533	~4 MB
World politics	World_Politics_News.zip	2,933	~6 MB

16 datasets, ~187,000 articles.

Also available: the full "Latest news" dataset — 86,560 articles, ~152 MB. It exceeds GitHub's 100 MB per-file limit, so it is not mirrored in this repository. Download it directly from newsdata.io/datasets.

Want a quick look at the schema before downloading? Tiny samples for the news and crypto-news streams live in sample/ (CSV + JSON + XLSX, under 500 KB each).

File formats and schema

Datasets ship as CSV and JSON (samples also include XLSX). Every article shares the same flat schema:

Field	Type	Description
article_id	string	Stable unique identifier for the article
title	string	Article headline
link	string	URL to the original article
description	string	Short summary / lede
content	string	Full article text
keywords	string	Comma-separated keywords
creator	string	Author / byline
pubDate	datetime	Publication date (UTC)
image_url	string	Hero / lead image URL
video_url	string	Embedded video URL, when present
source_id	string	Publisher identifier
source_priority	int	Publisher priority rank
source_url	string	Publisher domain
source_icon	string	Publisher favicon URL
language	string	ISO 639-1 language code (en, es, …)
country	string	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code (us, gb, …)
category	string	Top-level category
ai_tag	string	AI-extracted topic tag(s)
ai_region	string	AI-extracted geographic region
ai_org	string	AI-extracted organisation mention
sentiment	string	positive / neutral / negative
sentiment_stats	object	Per-sentiment confidence scores

Quick start

Clone the whole repository (or download a single archive from GitHub's file view) and unpack the category you need:

git clone https://github.com/newsdataapi/newsdata.io-free-datasets.git
cd newsdata.io-free-datasets

unzip Business_News.zip          # for .zip archives
7z x Sports_News.7z              # for .7z (install p7zip if needed)

Load with Python (pandas)

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("Business_News/Business_News.csv")
print(df.shape)
print(df[["title", "language", "country", "sentiment"]].head())

Load with Hugging Face Datasets

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("csv", data_files="Business_News/Business_News.csv")
print(ds["train"].features)

Load with Node.js

import fs from 'node:fs';

const data = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('Business_News/Business_News.json'));
console.log(data.length, 'articles');

Why these datasets?

• Free and openly licensed — released under CC BY 4.0, usable in commercial and non-commercial projects with simple attribution
• Broad coverage — 16 datasets spanning finance, sport, geopolitics, crypto, public health and AI policy
• Multi-language and multi-country — sources from publishers around the world
• AI-enriched out of the box — every article ships with AI-generated tags, region/organisation mentions, and sentiment scores, so you can skip a lot of preprocessing
• Two formats included — pick CSV for tabular tools (pandas, R, BI), JSON for streaming and NoSQL workflows; samples also include XLSX
• Schema-matched to a live API — when you need fresh data, the same schema is available in real time via the Newsdata.io REST API

Need real-time or custom news data?

These archives are static snapshots. For real-time and historical news in the same schema, use the Newsdata.io REST API or one of the official clients:

• REST API documentation — https://newsdata.io/documentation
• OpenAPI 3.1 spec — https://newsdata.io/openapi.json
• Python SDK — newsdataapi on PyPI (repo)
• Node.js SDK — newsdata-nodejs-client on npm (repo)
• React (hooks) SDK — newsdataapi on npm (repo)
• PHP SDK — newsdataio/newsdataapi on Packagist (repo)
• Java SDK — io.newsdata:newsdataapi on Maven Central (repo)
• .NET SDK — Newsdata.Api on NuGet (repo)
• Go client — github.com/newsdataapi/newsdata-go-client
• Dart / Flutter — newsdataapi on pub.dev (repo)
• MCP Server (use Newsdata.io from Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, etc.) — newsdata-mcp on PyPI (repo)

Sign up for a free Newsdata.io API key to get started — no credit card required.

About Newsdata.io

Newsdata.io provides high-quality real-time and historical news data through a developer-friendly REST API, sourced from 102,000+ news sources across 206 countries, 89 languages and 18 categories, with 10+ years of historical archives and 800M+ documents indexed. Our mission is to make news data easily accessible for analytics, research, journalism, and AI/ML applications.

License

These datasets are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license — see LICENSE for the full text.

You are free to share (copy and redistribute) and adapt (remix, transform, build upon) the datasets for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you give appropriate attribution to Newsdata.io and indicate if changes were made.

A simple attribution line is enough, e.g.:

News data provided by Newsdata.io, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Note on the underlying news content: The articles aggregated in these datasets were originally authored by their respective publishers and remain subject to those publishers' own copyrights. The CC BY 4.0 license here applies to the dataset compilation (a "sui generis" database right under CC BY 4.0 §4) — please respect the original publishers' rights when redistributing or republishing individual articles.

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