PR Newswire Scraper

Scrape PR Newswire — one of the world's largest press-release distribution networks — for structured, up-to-the-minute press releases. Search by keyword, or browse the latest releases across 16 industry categories (technology, healthcare, finance, energy, and more). No login, no API key, no cookies required.

What this actor does

• Five modes: search (free-text keyword search across headlines and body text), byCategory (latest releases in an industry, via PR Newswire's own RSS feeds), byOrganization (every release issued by one company's newsroom page), latest (newest releases across all industries, unfiltered), and byUrls (fetch full text of exact press-release URLs)
• 16 industry categories: Automotive & Transportation, Business Technology, Consumer Products & Retail, Consumer Technology, Energy, Entertainment & Media, Environment, Financial Services, General Business, Health, Heavy Industry & Manufacturing, Multicultural, Policy & Public Interest, Sports, Telecommunications, Travel
• Filters: language (2-letter code) — PR Newswire distributes releases in dozens of languages; publish-date range (dateFrom/dateTo), applied client-side against each release's real timestamp
• Live data: title, publish date, summary, source organization, and industry tags — scraped fresh on every run
• Empty fields are omitted — every record only contains fields that were actually found on the page/feed

Output per press release

• title
• url — direct link to the full press release
• guid — PR Newswire's unique release ID (mode=byCategory, mode=latest)
• publishedAt — ISO 8601 UTC timestamp
• summary — plain-text excerpt
• industries[] — PR Newswire's industry tags for this release (mode=byCategory, mode=latest, mode=byUrls when the page carries the tag module)
• category — the industry category slug this record was matched against (mode=byCategory only)
• organization — the company/organization that issued the release (mode=byCategory, mode=latest, mode=search, mode=byOrganization)
• language — BCP-47 language code (e.g. en-US, ja, de, zh-hant) — all modes except byUrls
• publisher — always "PR Newswire Association LLC." (mode=byCategory, mode=latest)
• imageUrl — thumbnail image if the release has one (mode=search, mode=byUrls)
• searchQuery — the query that produced this record (mode=search)
• organizationSlug — the company/organization newsroom slug that issued this release; feed it into mode=byOrganization to browse that company's full newsroom (mode=byOrganization, mode=search)
• updatedAt — ISO 8601 UTC last-modified timestamp (mode=byUrls)
• description — the lead sentence/dek of the release (mode=byUrls)
• datelineLocation — the release's dateline city/state, e.g. "SAN MATEO, Calif." (mode=byUrls)
• sourceOrganization — the company credited as "SOURCE" at the end of the release (mode=byUrls)
• bodyText — the full plain-text press-release body (mode=byUrls)
• mediaContactName, mediaContactPhone, mediaContactEmail — the release's own media/investor/press contact, when one is explicitly listed (mode=byUrls). mediaContactPhone is only present when a real phone number (not PR Newswire's own switchboard) appears right alongside that contact.
• tickerSymbols[] — stock-ticker mentions found in the release body, formatted EXCHANGE:SYMBOL (e.g. NASDAQ:PODD) — covers any publicly traded company named in the text (the issuer itself, or a third party such as a lawsuit defendant), present only on releases that mention one (mode=byUrls)
• recordType: "pressRelease", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	search, byCategory, byOrganization, latest, or byUrls
searchQuery	string	artificial intelligence	Free-text query (mode=search)
category	string	business-technology	Industry category to browse (mode=byCategory)
organizationSlug	string	microsoft-corporation	Company/organization newsroom slug to browse, e.g. microsoft-corporation (mode=byOrganization)
urls	array	[]	Exact prnewswire.com press-release URLs to fetch full text for (mode=byUrls)
language	string	–	Only keep releases in this language, e.g. en, fr, de — applies to search/byCategory/byOrganization/latest modes
dateFrom	string	–	Only keep releases published on/after this date (YYYY-MM-DD) — applies to search/byCategory/byOrganization/latest modes
dateTo	string	–	Only keep releases published on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD) — applies to search/byCategory/byOrganization/latest modes
maxItems	integer	30	Hard cap on emitted records
pageSize	integer	25	Cards per page fetch: 25/50/75/100 — higher values mean fewer requests to reach maxItems (mode=search, mode=byOrganization)

Example: keyword search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "artificial intelligence",
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: browse an industry category

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "health",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: a company's full newsroom

{
  "mode": "byOrganization",
  "organizationSlug": "microsoft-corporation",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: fetch full text of exact releases

{
  "mode": "byUrls",
  "urls": ["https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/example-press-release-300000000.html"]
}

Use cases

• PR/comms teams — monitor competitor press-release cadence by industry or company
• Media monitoring platforms — ingest a real-time press-release firehose across 16 industries
• Investor relations research — pull a public company's full newsroom history via byOrganization
• Market research — track announcement trends (product launches, funding, M&A) by keyword
• Financial signal extraction — use tickerSymbols[] from mode=byUrls to flag releases mentioning publicly traded companies
• Content aggregation — republish or summarize the latest releases in a niche industry vertical

Notes

• mode=byCategory reads PR Newswire's general RSS feed (the site's per-category RSS feeds were discontinued upstream — every category slug now serves the same ~20-item firehose feed of the most recent releases across all industries) and keeps only the releases whose real <prn:industry> tags match the selected category. Because that shared feed only ever holds ~20 releases total, a niche category can legitimately return 0–5 items on a given run — that reflects how few of the current 20 releases fall in that industry, not a bug. For broader/historical coverage of a specific industry, use mode=search with an industry keyword instead.
• mode=latest reads the same general RSS feed as mode=byCategory but skips the industry filter entirely, returning the newest ~20 releases across every industry — use this when you just want the freshest firehose without picking a category. Once those ~20 RSS items are exhausted, it automatically continues into PR Newswire's real paginated "all releases" HTML listing so maxItems values above 20 are still reachable; records sourced from that continuation don't carry organization/industries (not present in that page's card markup) but do carry title/url/publishedAt/summary/imageUrl/language.
• mode=search paginates the HTML search-results page up to maxItems.
• mode=byOrganization paginates a company's own newsroom page (prnewswire.com/news/<slug>/), which lists every release the company has issued through PR Newswire — going back further than mode=search's general index for that company. Find a company's slug by searching for it on prnewswire.com and copying the last path segment of its newsroom URL.
• mode=byUrls fetches the full body text of exact press-release pages — use this to get the complete release (not just the summary) after finding URLs via search or byCategory.
• If a page fails to load, the actor automatically retries with backoff and, as a last resort, falls back to the free Apify datacenter proxy (AUTO group) — no residential proxy or paid add-ons required.
• publishedAt for mode=search is converted from PR Newswire's displayed Eastern Time using a standard EDT/EST offset (PR Newswire only ever displays "ET" without distinguishing daylight/standard time).
• dateFrom/dateTo are applied client-side against each release's extracted publishedAt. PR Newswire's own startdate/enddate search query parameters are silently ignored server-side (verified live — a request scoped to a single past month still returns today's releases), so this is the only reliable way to date-filter results.

FAQ

Do I need an account or API key? No. This actor scrapes publicly available RSS feeds and search-results pages, both explicitly allowed by prnewswire.com's robots.txt.

Why are some fields missing on some releases? Only fields that were actually present in the feed/page are included in each record — e.g. industries only appears for byCategory records since search results don't carry industry tags.

How current is the data? Both RSS-backed and HTML-backed modes scrape live at run time — PR Newswire's feeds update continuously throughout the day.

Is this affiliated with PR Newswire? No, this is an independent third-party actor that reads PR Newswire's public feeds and pages. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by PR Newswire Association LLC.

Why does a niche byCategory category sometimes return very few results? PR Newswire's per-category RSS feeds were discontinued upstream, so every category now filters the same shared ~20-item firehose feed by its real industry tags. A niche category can legitimately return 0–5 items on a given run. Use mode=search with an industry keyword for broader/historical coverage.

Can I get the full press-release text, not just the summary? Yes — use mode=byUrls with the exact release URL(s) to get bodyText, the complete plain-text body, plus dateline, source organization and media contacts.

Can I filter by publish date? Yes, via dateFrom/dateTo (YYYY-MM-DD). These are applied client-side against each release's real timestamp, since PR Newswire's own date-range search parameters are ignored server-side.

What timezone are the dates in? publishedAt/updatedAt are always normalized to UTC ISO 8601, regardless of PR Newswire's own Eastern Time display.

Does this work for non-English releases? Yes — PR Newswire distributes releases in dozens of languages. Use the language filter (e.g. en, fr, de, ja) to restrict results to a single language.

How do I find a company's newsroom slug for byOrganization? Search the company on prnewswire.com and copy the last path segment of its newsroom URL, e.g. microsoft-corporation from prnewswire.com/news/microsoft-corporation/.