hotnews

MCP Tools

CLI tool to fetch trending news and hot topics from 8 sources across Chinese platforms and GitHub. Returns structured news items with titles, URLs, and metadata. USE FOR: - Fetching trending/hot news from Chinese and international platforms - Monitoring hot topics across social media, tech, finance, and news sites - Getting structured news data as JSON for further processing - Listing available news sources Requires npm install.

Install

openclaw skills install hotnews

hotnews CLI

Fetch trending news and hot topics from 8 sources. Returns news items with title, URL, hot metric, and rank.

Run hotnews --help for usage details.

Workflow

Follow this pattern:

List - Don't know what sources are available? List them first.
Fetch - Know the source? Fetch news directly.
JSON - Need structured data? Add --json for machine-readable output.

Need	Command	When
See all sources	`hotnews list`	Don't know source names
Get news	`hotnews <source>`	Know the source, want readable output
Get news as JSON	`hotnews <source> --json`	Need structured data for processing
Control item count	`hotnews <source> --limit N`	Want specific number of results (1-50, default 10)

Commands

list

List all available sources.

hotnews list

Fetch a source

hotnews baidu
hotnews baidu --json
hotnews weibo --limit 5
hotnews douyin -l 15 --json

Options

Flag	Short	Description
`--json`		Output as JSON
`--limit N`	`-l N`	Number of items to return (default: 10, max: 50)

Output fields (JSON mode):

title - News headline
url - Link to the article
hot - Popularity metric, e.g. "871 stars today", "5.3k" (optional)
rank - Position in the ranking (1-based)

Sources

8 source endpoints:

Platform	ID	Description
Baidu	`baidu`	Baidu real-time search trends
Weibo	`weibo`	Weibo real-time trending topics
Douyin	`douyin`	Douyin real-time trending
Hupu	`hupu`	Hupu street hot posts
36Kr	`kr36`	36Kr tech news flashes
Zhihu	`zhihu`	Zhihu trending questions
Juejin	`juejin`	Juejin developer community hot articles
GitHub	`github`	GitHub trending open source projects today

Source Selection Guide

Category	Recommended Sources
General News	`baidu`, `weibo`, `toutiao`
Social/Trending	`weibo`, `douyin`, `zhihu`
Tech/Developer	`juejin`, `github`, `kr36`
Sports/Lifestyle	`hupu`

Working with Results

hotnews baidu --json | jq '.[].title'
hotnews baidu --json --limit 5
hotnews weibo --json | jq '.[] | "\(.rank). \(.title) \(.hot // "")"'
hotnews github --json | jq '.[] | "\(.title) - \(.hot)"'