How to Monitor Medium Publications and Newsletter Feeds via API

Monitor Medium Publications and Newsletter Feeds via API

The Zenndra API enables the programmatic monitoring of Medium collections and newsletter feeds. This system allows developers to track publication-level signals rather than just individual users.

Why This Matters

Most content tracking products focus exclusively on individual users, missing half the available signal because readers follow curated collections like Towards Data Science. Relying solely on user-based tracking creates a visibility gap in competitive intelligence and content aggregation.

Key Insights

• Publication Resolution: Use GET /publication/id_for/{slug} to resolve a human-readable slug into a unique publication_id (Zenndra, 2026).
• Syndication Pattern: Implement scheduled polling of /publication/{id}/articles to create a normalized content aggregator table (Zenndra, 2026).
• Metadata Extraction: Utilize /publication/{id}/newsletter to extract signup UX copy and cadence hints for partner cross-promotion (Zenndra, 2026).

Working Examples

Resolving a Medium publication slug to an ID.

const API = 'https://api.zenndra.com';
const headers = { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ZENNDRA_API_KEY}` };
async function resolvePublication(slug) {
  const res = await fetch(`${API}/publication/id_for/${encodeURIComponent(slug)}`, { headers });
  const { publication_id } = await res.json();
  return publication_id;
}
const pubId = await resolvePublication('towards-data-science');

Polling for new stories and filtering against known IDs stored in Redis or Postgres.

async function pollPublication(publicationId, knownIds) {
  const res = await fetch(`${API}/publication/${publicationId}/articles`, { headers });
  const { articles } = await res.json();
  const fresh = (articles ?? []).filter((a) => !knownIds.has(a.id));
  fresh.forEach((a) => knownIds.add(a.id));
  return fresh; // enqueue webhooks, Slack, email digest
}

Practical Applications

• Competitive Intelligence: Alerting systems that notify teams when rival publications ship daily content; avoid the pitfall of ignoring empty polls which often indicate an incorrect slug rather than lack of news.
• Employee Intranets: Surfacing partner content with attribution; avoid the pitfall of duplicate entries by deduplicating globally on article_id when watching overlapping publications.

References:

• https://dev.to/zenndraapi/monitor-medium-publications-and-newsletter-feeds-via-api-4g69