South African news monitoring
Use IOL endpoints to turn south african news monitoring into repeatable API requests with documented inputs and JSON responses.
Monitor Independent Online’s South African provincial reporting, politics, BRICS, energy, crime, and sport through five structured endpoints.
Extract IOL’s South African news sections, latest stories, headlines, articles, and author profiles as JSON.
Endpoint families
5
Documented params
9
Examples
5
Live catalog snapshot
Active endpoints
5
Methods
GET
Required params
7
Schema refs
5
{
"platform": "IOL",
"endpoint": "iol-news",
"method": "GET",
"path": "/iol/news",
"auth": "apiKey"
}Use cases
Extract IOL’s South African news sections, latest stories, headlines, articles, and author profiles as JSON.
Use IOL endpoints to turn south african news monitoring into repeatable API requests with documented inputs and JSON responses.
Use IOL endpoints to turn provincial reporting analysis into repeatable API requests with documented inputs and JSON responses.
Use IOL endpoints to turn rugby and cricket tracking into repeatable API requests with documented inputs and JSON responses.
Managed execution
Every figure below is read from the live IOL endpoint catalog — 5 endpoints, 9 documented request parameters, and 5 published response schemas — the same catalog Docs and Playground run against.
5 documented IOL endpoints, grouped into 5 request families — Article, Author and Headlines, plus 2 more.
9 request parameters are documented across those IOL endpoints, 7 of them required — the full input contract is public before you write any integration code.
5 of the 5 IOL endpoints ship a recorded example response, and 5 carry a documented response schema — you can code against the real JSON before the first request.
IOL endpoints document their error responses (400, 404 and 503) alongside the success schema, so a block, a rate limit, or a missing record comes back as a typed error rather than silently empty data.
5 hosted MCP tools back the IOL endpoints, so an agent can call the same routes with the same parameters and the same JSON contract, with no custom glue.
Coverage map
/iol/article
/iol/author
/iol/headlines
/iol/news
/iol/sections
Endpoint catalog
/iol/sectionsReturns the verified IOL section inventory accepted by the headlines endpoint: news, sport, business, lifestyle, entertainment, technology, motoring, travel and opinion, their sub-sections, provincial news and the sister-title feeds.
MCP tool iol_sections
/iol/newsReturns the 30 newest stories from IOL (Independent Online, South Africa), with no parameters. Each item has its title, canonical article URL, short summary, publication time, author byline and lead image.
MCP tool iol_news
/iol/headlinesReturns recent IOL headlines for one section path. `section` is required and takes a value such as `news`, `news/south-africa/gauteng`, `sport/rugby/springboks`, `business/economy` or `entertainment/music`. Each item has its title, URL, summary, publication time and image, plus the author when the outlet names one. Unlisted values are rejected.
MCP tool iol_headlines
/iol/articleReturns an IOL article by `url`, a canonical `iol.co.za` story link. The response has the title, description, section (the deepest in the breadcrumb, such as `Crime and Courts`), authors, lead image, publish and update times, and body `paragraphs`. Section, author, tag and search pages are rejected. `paywalled` is never set.
MCP tool iol_article
/iol/authorReturns an IOL author profile, identified by `slug` (such as `xolile-mtembu`) or a canonical `iol.co.za/authors/<slug>/` `url`; provide exactly one. The response has the name, `role` and `image_url` when present, and up to 25 recent articles with title, URL, summary, section and a `published_date` taken from the article URL. Unknown authors return not found.
MCP tool iol_author
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How to scrape IOL
IOL is a South African current-affairs platform whose catalog documents 123 live section feeds verified on 2026-09-25, including provincial desks and deep sport routes. Keep provincial sections separate in a monitoring job, because a Johannesburg or Cape Town desk has a geographic scope that the national current-affairs feed does not.
Call /iol/sections to select a path such as news/south-africa/gauteng, news/brics, sport/rugby, or sport/cricket.
Use /iol/news for the latest site-wide reporting or /iol/headlines with a precise section path for a province or sport.
Use /iol/article with a canonical URL and /iol/author when a public staff or contributor profile is available.
FAQ
The catalog documents 123 section feeds verified live on 2026-09-25, spanning South African provinces, Africa, BRICS, politics, energy, crime, and extensive sport branches.
Yes. The sections endpoint exposes province-specific paths such as Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, and Western Cape for use with headlines.
The documented IOL news feed returns the newest 30 stories with title, URL, summary, publication time, byline, and lead image where available.