Over the holidays, I'm hoping to vibe code a news monitoring app. I am going for comprehensive coverage of niche topics, so I don't just want some API covering the major publications.

I find regular Google News searches to be quite comprehensive (and it's possible to construct them as RSS feeds), but the terms of use don't allow for commercial use cases.

I once demo'd an AI financial SaaS that pulled news articles with a Vertex AI URL, so I thought there would be a Google cloud service equivalent, but I can't locate and haven't managed to prompt for something like that in Google AI Studio or Antigravity.

There are a bunch of commercial news API providers, but I'm guessing that the pricing will undermine any economic rationale for my app. I tried a keyword search with newsdata.io and got almost nothing relevant. Not sure if others are better. My concept is to use AI agents to comb through thousands of news items to identify anything relevant to a particular audience. I only need to do this at the article title-level.

This has me wondering how informational projects/startups handle the sourcing of news. For that matter, what happens when I set up a news alert task in Perplexity? And what exactly is a News API? Some of the providers seem like dinky outfits...I can't imagine that they went around negotiating licensing with every media provider.