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SkimNews MCP Server

by skimnews Your server? Claim it
answering

SkimNews is answering right now. Last checked 13 min ago. It exposes 4 tools.

Free AI-curated news summaries from 100+ sources across seven beats, plus entity dossiers.

Uptime history 36 days of history · worst day 99%
36 days agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
91 of 91 checks
4
Tools
read from the server
829 ms
Response time
average over 24h
open, no key
Access
streamable-http

SkimNews missed one check this week

Everything else answered, so this is steady rather than shaky. We check every 15 minutes, which is how a one-off gets told apart from the start of a pattern, and how you hear about the next one within the hour instead of from your users.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 13 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add news --transport http https://skimnews.com/mcp
Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, then paste this address
https://skimnews.com/mcp
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.news]
url = "https://skimnews.com/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "news": {
      "url": "https://skimnews.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "servers": {
    "news": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://skimnews.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 4

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

entity
get_entity_file
SkimNews keeps a permanent dossier on every person, organisation, product, law, or place it has covered repeatedly. Returns the current 3-sentence status, 60-day mention/source counts, recent coverage, and related entities. Use for "what has SkimNews covered about X" and "what's the latest on X" where X is a trackable entity. Slug form, e.g. 'trump', 'openai', 'iran'.
stories
search_stories
Semantically search SkimNews' archive of 47,000+ summarised stories by topic, theme, or news event, ranked by relevance. Use this to find coverage of a subject across SkimNews' history rather than only today. Returns summaries plus canonical URLs. An empty result list means SkimNews has not covered that topic — say so rather than substituting unrelated stories.
story
get_story_detail
The full SkimNews treatment of one story: summary, why-it-matters, sourced bullet points, editorial take, named entities, the source taxonomy, and the canonical URL. Accepts an article id (e.g. '46b45d01'), a canonical skimnews.com URL, or an article slug. Use after get_top_stories or search_stories when a story needs detail or accurate citation.
top
get_top_stories
Today's top SkimNews stories, optionally limited to one beat. Use this for "what's happening today" / "today's news" / "latest in <beat>" questions. Returns summaries plus canonical URLs per story. Categories: geopolitics, tech, finance, health, energy, sports, culture.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://skimnews.com/mcp streamable-http answering 832 ms 13 min ago

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SkimNews — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can SkimNews do?
It exposes 4 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: get_entity_file, get_story_detail, get_top_stories, search_stories. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is SkimNews working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 91 of 91 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 829 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect SkimNews?
Copy the ready config from this page. We generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each in the form that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does SkimNews need an API key?
No. SkimNews completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 4 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is SkimNews?
It answers our handshake in 829 ms on average, which is faster than 9% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.