new york times movie reviews api

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Use all the New York Times APIs in Python!

michadenheijer/pynytimes

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Use all (actually most) New York Times APIs, get all the data you need from the Times!

Documentation

Extensive documentation is available at: https://pynytimes.michadenheijer.com/ .

Installation

There are multiple options to install and ugprade pynytimes, but the easiest is by just installing it using pip (or pip3 ).

Linux and Mac

You can easily import this library using:

Then you can simply add your API key (get your API key from The New York Times Dev Portal ):

Make sure that if you commit your code to GitHub you don't accidentially commit your API key .

Supported APIs

When you have imported this library you can use the following features from the New York Times API.

Article search

Book reviews, movie reviews, top stories, most viewed articles, most shared articles, best sellers lists, article metadata, archive metadata, load latest articles.

• Tag query (TimesTags)

To get the current top stories use:

Read the documentation to find the top stories per section.

You can also get todays most viewed articles:

Read the documentation to get the most viewed articles per week or month.

To get the most shared articles (shared over email) use:

Read the documentation to get the most shared articles using facebook.

Search articles using a query using:

In this example we have just defined the content of the search query (Obama), but we can add many more search parameters. Read the documentation to see how.

You can easily find book reviews for every book you've read. You can find those reviews by searching for the author, ISBN or title of the book.

Read the documentation to find more information about additional parameters.

You can not only get the book reviews, but the movie reviews too.

The New York Times has multiple best sellers lists. To get from the fiction best seller list:

Read how to get the other best seller lists in the documentation .

With an URL from a New York Times article you can easily get all the metadata you need from it.

Read additional parameters in the documentation .

You can easily load the latest articles published by the New York Times.

Additional parameters can be found in the documentation .

The New York Times has their own tags library. You can query this library with this API.

If you want to load all the metadata from a specific month, then this API makes that possible. Be aware you'll download a big JSON file (about 20 Mb), so it can take a while.

Read more in the documentation .

Citing this Repository

If you use pynytimes , a citation would be very much appriciated. If you're using BibTeX you can use the following citation:

If you're not using BibTeX, you can retrieve the preferred citation from Zenodo .

Disclaimer : This project is not made by anyone from the New York Times, nor is it affiliated with The New York Times Company.

Code of conduct

Security policy, releases 17, contributors 4.

• Python 99.9%

• Services & Software

'The New York Times' offers up movie reviews API

<i>The New York Times</i> has launched a movie reviews API that will make it easier for readers to find the publication's library of 22,000 movie reviews.

The New York Times announced that it has launched a movie reviews API that will make it easier for visitors to access the publication's library of 22,000 movie reviews dating back to 1924.

Realizing that it's sitting on a vast library of movie reviews and its current RSS feed only displays the latest 65 articles, the Times decided that it needed to give its readers access to its entire library of reviews to complement its current offering and make it easier for visitors to find all the film information they're looking for.

So far, the Times claims that the API will make the full text of the movie reviews available, ordered by DVD release date, along with extras like biographical information for the three top critics. Each film will be indexed by "title, reviewer's name, director's name, names of the top five actors, and plot keywords."

As much content as the API currently provides, the Times did say that it isn't able to give users direct access to trailers and video clips yet. It hopes to add that feature to the API sometime in the future.

In order to use the Movie Reviews API, users need to sign up for an API key. Usage is currently limited to 5,000 requests per day.

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Public APIs

New York Times Movie Reviews

A Look at the NY Times Movie Reviews API

The NY Times Movie Reviews API is a fantastic resource for any application that needs to access data about movies. This API provides access to reviews published by the New York Times, as well as information about movies themselves. Here, we'll explore how to use this powerful tool.

Getting Started

To get started using the NY Times Movie Reviews API, you'll need to register for an API key . Once you have your key, we can move on to exploring the API itself.

Example Code

Let's jump right into some example code! Below, you'll find some JavaScript code that demonstrates how to use the NY Times Movie Reviews API to search for reviews of specific movies.

In this example, we define a function called searchReviews , which takes a movieName parameter and returns an array of review objects. We pass the movieName parameter to the API, along with our API key, to generate a URL for our API request. We then use the fetch() method to make the API request and convert the response to JSON format. Finally, we return the results array from the response.

We can use this function to search for movie reviews from within our application. When we call the searchReviews function with the name of a movie, it will return an array of review objects, which we can then use however we like.

The NY Times Movie Reviews API is a powerful tool that can greatly enhance the functionality of any movie-related application. We've explored how to use this API to search for reviews of specific movies, but there are plenty of other ways to leverage this resource. So, start exploring the possibilities today!

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Getting Started with the NYT API

Introduction

The web is chock full of valuable troves of data that can spawn an infinite number of social science research projects. However, not all data is easily accessible! While some data can be easily downloaded , access to some sources of data are dictated by what is known as an API . Standing for application programming interface, APIs are a set of defined protocols governing the terms of access to software and servers from programs created by third parties. Whenever you use your Gmail account as a way to sign in to another website or purchase an item on eBay with your PayPal account, you are using an API.

In the context of social science research, APIs are a valuable means to acquire critical data that is not directly available. For example, if you want to model the relationship between Twitter sentiment and the stock market, you’ll need access to APIs that provide Twitter and stock price data. Furthermore, you might even consider using an API to derive the sentiment scores. A project such as this one would be impossible to do without knowing how to retrieve data via APIs.

That’s why we here at the D-Lab have put together this handy tutorial for when you need to get your hands on data guarded by an API. In this post, we use the New York Times API as our example on how to acquire access to an API, query, and process data. 

Acquiring Access

For most APIs, a key or other user credentials are required for any database querying.  Generally, this requires that you register with the organization.  Most APIs are set up for developers, so you'll likely be asked to register an "application".  All this really entails is coming up with a name for your app/bot/project, and providing your real name, organization, and email.  Note that some more popular APIs (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) will require additional information, such as a web address or mobile number.

Once you've successfully registered, you will be assigned one or more keys, tokens, or other credentials that must be supplied to the server as part of any API call you make. The generated keys provided to you are essentially a set of passcodes that grant you access to their servers.  To make sure that users aren't abusing their data access privileges (e.g. by making many rapid queries), each set of keys will be given several rate limits  governing the total number of calls that can be made over certain intervals of time.  For the NYT Article API, we have relatively generous rate limits --- 10 calls per minute and 4,000 calls per day.

Before we can start playing with the NYT data we first need to follow their instructions on how to sign up for an account and generate access keys which can be found on the “ Get Started ” section of their developer website.

Once your account has been created,  log into the “ Get Started ” page -  if you are not already logged in. Then, register a new app (you can call it something like NYT Tutorial),  and copy and save your keys to a secure file on your computer. You can enable one or more APIs that are available on the NYT developer website. To follow along, enable the Top Stories , Most Viewed/shared articles , and Article search APIs.

REMEMBER TO NEVER SHARE YOUR KEYS ACCIDENTALLY OR INTENTIONALLY

This line can never be repeated enough. You wouldn’t publish your password, the same logic should apply to your API keys. If you’re publishing your project to Github, make sure you remove your keys from your code and files. You wouldn’t want someone to use your keys and possibly get your access revoked.

All the Data That’s Fit to Query

Now that we’ve been given the green light to access the New York Times’ servers, let’s delve into what data goodies we’ve been given permission to query.

Here is the collection of the APIs the NYT gives us :

Top stories : Returns an array of articles currently on the specified section 

Most viewed/shared articles : Provides services for getting the most popular articles on NYTimes.com based on emails, shares, or views.

Article search : Look up articles by keyword. You can refine your search using filters and facets.

Books : Provides information about book reviews and The New York Times Best Sellers lists.

Movie reviews : Search movie reviews by keyword and opening date and filter by Critics' Picks.

Times Wire : Get links and metadata for Times' articles as soon as they are published on NYTimes.com. The Times Newswire API provides an up-to-the-minute stream of published articles.

Tag query (TimesTags) : Provide a string of characters and the service returns a ranked list of suggested terms.

Archive metadata : Returns an array of NYT articles for a given month, going back to 1851.

These descriptions alone should have you salivating at the possibilities of what you can do with this valuable data.

Establishing a Connection

We’ve been given access to their servers and we have an understanding of what we can retrieve. Now, it’s time to actually establish a connection and start pulling in data.

Our means to access the NYT’s server comes via a third-party Python package called PyNYTimes . This tool created by Micha den Heijer, makes querying the NYT API incredibly easy, much more so than if we were to write the code to directly access the API.

This means we need to install the library which can be done with either of the following bash/shell commands:

Linux/Mac users : pip install --upgrade pynytimes  

Windows users : python -m pip install --upgrade pynytimes

Once the package is installed, open up a Jupyter Notebook or Python file and import the PyNYTimes library and connect to their servers with your API key.

Time to get querying!

We’ll be taking a tour of three of the NYT’s APIs, with the first one being “Top Stories”. Reminder, you cannot query an NYT API if you did not enable it when you generated your API key.

Top Stories

In a single line of code we can download data on the trending stories from the Times’ home page.

By simply call the top_stories method on nyt we got instant access to a list of dictionaries containing data on the trending stories of the data.

Let’s take a look at the actual data so we can understand the format it’s delivered.

The screenshot above is an example of what one news article’s worth of data looks like at the time when I made the API call. This output is pretty typical of API calls in that you’ll usually see it delivered in dictionary form. 

Does anything about the data stand out to you? What bits of information could be useful to you and your research needs?

If we are interested in a specific section then we can pass tags such as “arts”, “politics” or “sports” to the section argument inside the top_stories method

Most Viewed/Shared Articles

With the next API, we’ll be pulling in data about the most popular articles based on views and shares.

Inside the most_viewed() method, there is an argument called days which allows you to retrieve the most viewed articles for the past day, week or month — it only accepts possible values: 1, 7, 30.

If we look at the data in most_viewed_today you’ll notice it’s different in its content from what we see before using top_stories().

The meaning of some data attributes, like "copyright" is obvious, whereas for others, like "per_facet", it is not.   This is why developers often provide a schema , which is essentially a guide to the data.

The schema for the  Most Viewed Articles API  can be found here and in the following table.

This table lays out what each attribute means and its datatype, all of which is crucial information for processing and analyzing data.

Most Shared

The most_shared method is similar to most_viewed except that has an argument called method which is used to pull the most shared articles based on emails or Facebook posts. Learn more about data pulled from this method from its schema ,

Article Search

Time to take it up a notch and use the NYT Article search API to retrieve a set of articles about a particular topic in a chosen period of time.

The above line retrieves the twenty most recent articles featuring Elon Musk, a snippet of which is shown below.

Again this data appears to be quite different from what we’ve seen before and that’s why it’s recommended to consult the relevant schemas. The NYT not only provides a schema for this particular API but for sections of the data stored in it.

The following list of schemas hold the details on what things such as keyword and byline mean in the context of this data dump.

Article Schema

Let's try this operation again but this time for a specific time period. For example, how would we retrieve all the articles about the first two months of the George Floyd protests?

We need to pass a dictionary to the dates argument which contains keys named "begin" and "end". Those two keys point to datetime objects that we'll use as time markers to limit the returned results.

We're also going to use the “options” key to filter and sort our results.

If you are following along, try running that code. Explore the returned results by changing the date filters.

While all APIs are different in terms of how they’re constructed and how they output their data, this tutorial should give you a good sense of what to expect and how to get started. We definitely encourage you to further explore the New York Times API or test out some other ones such as Twitter and Reddit

But always remember these four things when it comes to acquiring data from the web.

If there’s an API, use that instead of web scraping - the process of writing code to automate copying and pasting information from a web page.

Be aware of your rate-limits. Budget your calls accordingly, you don’t want to hit your limit halfway grabbing your data.

• Most APIs, including those from the NYT, have a Terms of Service (or Terms of Use) page on their developer website. Please review that carefully and use the APIs accordingly. 

And of course SAFELY SECURE AND NEVER SHARE YOUR API KEYS!

To get the most out of an API, you will need to know how to manipulate the returned data in the programming language of your choice. In this tutorial, we use Python, so the ability to manipulate Python dictionaries is essential to using the API data effectively. You may also want to learn about and apply computational methods like text analysis, data visualization, and machine learning to explore and analyze the data.

The code featured in this blog post can be found on the D-Lab’s Web APIs and Web Scraping  Github repo. We encourage you to register for our upcoming March 7th workshop on retrieving data from the web using Python. You can also subscribe to the D-Lab's newsletter to stay abreast of future iterations of this workshop and others that can help you manipulate and explore API data.

George McIntire

pynytimes 0.10.0

pip install pynytimes Copy PIP instructions

Released: Apr 21, 2023

A Python wrapper for (most) New York Times APIs

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License: MIT License (MIT)

Author: Micha den Heijer

Requires: Python >=3.9, <4

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• Information Technology
• Science/Research
• OSI Approved :: MIT License
• Python :: 3.9
• Python :: 3.10
• Python :: 3.11
• Python :: 3.12
• Python :: Implementation :: CPython
• Python :: Implementation :: PyPy

Project description

Use all (actually most) New York Times APIs, get all the data you need from the Times!

Documentation

Extensive documentation is available at: https://pynytimes.michadenheijer.com/ .

Installation

There are multiple options to install and ugprade pynytimes, but the easiest is by just installing it using pip (or pip3 ).

Linux and Mac

You can easily import this library using:

Then you can simply add your API key (get your API key from The New York Times Dev Portal ):

Make sure that if you commit your code to GitHub you don't accidentially commit your API key .

Supported APIs

When you have imported this library you can use the following features from the New York Times API.

Article search

Book reviews, movie reviews, top stories, most viewed articles, most shared articles, best sellers lists, article metadata, archive metadata, load latest articles.

• Tag query (TimesTags)

To get the current top stories use:

Read the documentation to find the top stories per section.

You can also get todays most viewed articles:

Read the documentation to get the most viewed articles per week or month.

To get the most shared articles (shared over email) use:

Read the documentation to get the most shared articles using facebook.

Search articles using a query using:

In this example we have just defined the content of the search query (Obama), but we can add many more search parameters. Read the documentation to see how.

You can easily find book reviews for every book you've read. You can find those reviews by searching for the author, ISBN or title of the book.

Read the documentation to find more information about additional parameters.

You can not only get the book reviews, but the movie reviews too.

The New York Times has multiple best sellers lists. To get from the fiction best seller list:

Read how to get the other best seller lists in the documentation .

With an URL from a New York Times article you can easily get all the metadata you need from it.

Read additional parameters in the documentation .

You can easily load the latest articles published by the New York Times.

Additional parameters can be found in the documentation .

The New York Times has their own tags library. You can query this library with this API.

If you want to load all the metadata from a specific month, then this API makes that possible. Be aware you'll download a big JSON file (about 20 Mb), so it can take a while.

Read more in the documentation .

Citing this Repository

If you use pynytimes , a citation would be very much appriciated. If you're using BibTeX you can use the following citation:

If you're not using BibTeX, you can retrieve the preferred citation from Zenodo .

Disclaimer : This project is not made by anyone from the New York Times, nor is it affiliated with The New York Times Company.

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New York’s studio building boom poses threat to L.A.’s Hollywood production

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Pat Swinney Kaufman may have enough ceremonial shovels in her office to start her own small construction firm.

As commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, based above the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan, Kaufman helped break ground on a number of new studios and soundstages to accommodate the TV and movie producers shooting in the region.

Company Town

We checked in with Hollywood writers a year after the strike. They’re not OK

Film and TV writers of varying experience levels are struggling to find work after the Hollywood strikes amid an ongoing industry contraction.

May 13, 2024

Next year, Sunset Pier 94 Studios will open on the West Side of Manhattan, adding six state-of-the-art soundstages blocks away from Midtown and the Theater District. In Queens, a new facility called Wildflower, backed in part by Robert De Niro, will add 775,000 square feet of stage space. And East End Studios, which has four soundstage facilities in California, is scheduled to open a new space in Sunnyside, Queens, in 2025.

“We are the creative and artistic capital of this country and we are very committed to building on that,” Kaufman said. “We want it to flourish.”

The aggressive studio expansions signal New York’s continued determination to double down on the film business and compete with its main rival, Los Angeles, for a bigger slice of the Hollywood pie — even as the industry is struggling to rebound nationwide.

Subscribers get exclusive access to this story

We’re offering L.A. Times subscribers special access to our best journalism. Thank you for your support. Explore more Subscriber Exclusive content .

Last year, the New York state legislature boosted the annual film tax credit allocation to $700 million, up from $420 million. It also raised the credit on qualified expenses (including actors’ salaries) to 30% (with an extra 10% for upstate productions) and accelerated the timeline for claiming credits — a big issue for producers.

The changes were intended to help the state better compete with other states such as neighboring New Jersey, which also is adding studio space and pulling work away from New York.

New York’s film industry grew rapidly after the state enacted its first credit in 2004. Production jobs grew at an average rate of 3% annually over the next 15 years — outpacing New York City’s overall job growth in that time and adding about 35,000 jobs, according to the mayor’s office.

But the dual strikes of the writers and actors last year brought production to a standstill at a time when the region was still recovering from the pandemic.

As in Los Angeles, work has been slow to return since the new labor deals were signed in the fall, creating some jitters in an industry that accounts for 6.5% of New York’s economy.

In a sign of the slowdown, Brooklyn-based Broadway Stages, which has been in operation since 1983, was at 50% capacity in April, the lowest level in memory according to its communications director, Barbara Leatherwood.

“Before the pandemic, everybody was just packed,” said Leatherwood in a recent interview. “We were packed. We were at 95%.”

Almost everyone in Hollywood wants to get back to work. What’s taking so long?

Studios and workers alike were eager to restart film and TV production after the Hollywood strikes concluded. What’s taking so long in California?

March 21, 2024

And more studio space is coming online. Great Point Studios, which also has locations in Atlanta, Buffalo and New Jersey, recently completed a facility in Yonkers, located 15 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

Kaufman acknowledged that production work isn’t back to to the level it was before the strikes. “We’re watching with bated breath,” she said.

She pointed out that the number of permits to shoot in New York has grown steadily since the Writers Guild of America strike ended last September. The commissioner’s office counted 212 projects shooting in the city during April, up from 187 for the same month in 2023.

Still, the additional new studio space comes at a time when there is concern that television and movie production is at an inflection point in the streaming age.

Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are crashing TV’s ad-selling party

The streaming services will be looking for a larger share of the $27-billion pot for commercial time in the 2024-25 TV season.

April 24, 2024

While broadcast and cable TV series once provided a reliable number of episodes each season, from 13 to 22, season orders from streamers typically are shorter. One long-running New York-based hit, CBS’ “Blue Bloods,” will end this year after 14 seasons. Broadcast networks that once stocked up on such shows now rely more on reality competitions, game shows and live sports to fill their schedules.

As media companies such as Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery face headwinds, further consolidation seems likely. After a spending spree on content in recent years, media executives are talking about making fewer films and shows in an effort to reduce costs and improve profitability.

Amid the industry challenges, some veteran soundstage owners question whether there will be enough production for the new studio space to thrive long-term.

Doug Steiner, who opened Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1999 and recently broke ground on a 15-acre location in the Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, believes some of the newcomers will face challenges. Steiner’s soundstages provided homes for Amazon’s hit “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as well as movies including “The Joker.”

“There is an explosion of proposed new studios both nationally and globally,” Steiner said. “People who have never done it have no idea what they are getting into, and it’ll be a disaster for most of them.”

The new studio entrants say their expansion is based on an increased demand for larger spaces that can handle the more elaborate and expensive productions.

“What we saw in 2019 is an acute shortage of modern infrastructure for how films are made today,” said Robert Halmi, founder of Great Point Studios. “The shows that are being made for the streamers are much bigger than the shows that were being made for broadcast television 10 years ago.”

Andrew Kimball, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, believes employment levels in the film and television business will be back to pre-pandemic levels within six months; the city pegs that figure at 185,000 jobs.

“The forms of content creation are evolving as technology changes,” Kimball said. “Having the talent and stages is absolutely fundamental to the industry, and we remain very bullish even with the changes.”

The corporation partnered with Vornado Realty Trust, Hudson Pacific Properties and Blackstone to develop Sunset Pier 94 Studios, the first facility built in Manhattan specifically for film and TV production. The site, with six soundstages totaling 85,000 square feet, is set to open next year.

Halmi and others attribute the slow recovery to uncertainty surrounding the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Production’s talks with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees , which represents film and TV crew members. Some productions have decided to set up in Canada, rather than risk a holdup from another possible job action.

“I think we’re just in a place where the industry is right-sizing itself,” Leatherwood said. “The thirst for good entertainment that we produce in the United States has not gone away.”

One factor that soundstage owners believe they have in their favor is the support of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who backed the 66% increase in the state tax credit last year even as some critics have questioned its effectiveness.

“The New York credit is completely competitive in all respects,” Steiner said.

Production stages are at the core of the state’s tax credit. While Hollywood-based film and TV studios own their lots, most of the New York production spaces are independently owned businesses. If a production wants to benefit from the tax credit, it must use one of the stages recognized by the state.

“You don’t get the incentive if you come here and spend three weeks shooting outside,” said Kaufman, who helped develop the first tax credit when she was executive director of the state’s film office. “You must shoot in one of our soundstages. In our opinion this is how we build an industry.”

It took decades for New York to establish itself as the largest production hub outside of Los Angeles. While feature filmmakers always sought out New York when needed for a backdrop, attracting cost-conscious TV series wasn’t easy.

New York City was a mecca for TV during the industry’s golden age of the 1950s. Playwrights and theater-trained acting talent were based in the city and provided a steady flow of talent for live original plays, which made up much of prime-time programming in those early years.

Once Hollywood became involved in TV, production headed west. Studios such as Warner Bros. and Universal had expansive lots and crews with experience on feature films, providing the scale and convenience needed for TV to grow.

Filmed TV series dwindled in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, as the city and its residents were not always cooperative. The streets became more unruly and crime-ridden.

ABC’s gritty late-1960s cop series “N.Y.P.D.” used members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang to provide security around its East Village studio space. Producers found that doing business in Los Angeles was simply more trouble-free.

As New York’s economy rebounded in the 1980s and ’90s, TV production started to trickle back in. More stars and filmmakers with roots on the East Coast wanted to work near home, which has remained the key reason for filming in the city. (When inveterate New York actor Tony Randall did the NBC sitcom “Love, Sidney” in the early 1980s, his contract guaranteed the show would be produced in the city.)

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“(Filming in New York) will always be a bottom-line decision,” Steiner said. “But there is some very sought-after talent that lives here and that will only work on a project if it’s here.”

Producer Dick Wolf is the trailblazer for the current New York production scene. He was insistent about making New York his base for “Law & Order” when it launched in 1990.

Wolf even negotiated his own deal with craft unions so he could keep “Law & Order” in the city when under pressure from NBC to cut the show’s budget in the early 1990s.

When HBO became a major producer of original series in the late ’90s, the premium cable channel generated New York-based hits such as “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.” The shows became cultural touchstones that enhanced the city’s image as a place to film. (“And Just Like That...,” the “Sex and the City” sequel on Max, now shoots in New York.)

But the enactment of the state’s film production tax credit in 2004 was the true catalyst for production growth. The credit was designed to allay the economic impact of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on New York, which jolted the entire city’s economy and led to a slump in the number of motion picture and video production jobs.

Prolific producers who set up shop in New York tend to stay put. Wolf’s three “Law & Order” shows and three FBI-themed series for CBS are in production at Broadway Stages.

Robert and Michelle King made their long-running CBS hit “The Good Wife” and its sequel “The Good Fight” in New York. Their newest series, “Elsbeth,” the quirky police-legal drama recently renewed by CBS, is New York-based, as is the fourth and final season of the Kings’ Paramount+ horror series, “Evil.”

The city wants to remove any barriers to production coming in. It has a free “Made in NY” training program for production assistants, which has seen more than 1,200 participants since its inception.

“We’re working hard to stay ahead of the game and make sure we’ve got enough workforce here,” Kaufman said.

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Stephen Battaglio writes about television and the media business for the Los Angeles Times out of New York. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. He is also the author of three books about television, including a biography of pioneer talk show host and producer David Susskind.

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