1. Introduction

For this assignment, I used the New York Times Most Popular API, which provides data on the most viewed, shared, and emailed articles on NYTimes.com. This API allows access to trending content over different time periods (1, 7, or 30 days). In this analysis, I retrieved the most viewed articles in the past week and transformed the JSON data into an R DataFrame for analysis.

2. Load Libraries

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
library(dplyr)

3. Set Up API Connection

api_key <- "c96obdM8JuqLC6Avv0xQc4hR0YHGQhzL"
url <- paste0("https://api.nytimes.com/svc/mostpopular/v2/emailed/7.json?api-key=", api_key)
response <- GET(url)
status_code(response)
## [1] 200

4. Parse JSON

data_json <- content(response, "text")
data_list <- fromJSON(data_json, flatten = TRUE)
names(data_list)
## [1] "status"      "copyright"   "num_results" "results"

5. Transform to DataFrame

mailed_df <- data_list$results %>%
  select(title, byline, section, published_date, url)

head(mailed_df)
##                                                        title
## 1                      9 Exercises for Strong, Stable Ankles
## 2                                     Burnin’ Down the House
## 3                 Rewriting What’s Possible in the Mountains
## 4                      There’s a Reason Trump Fears No Kings
## 5        The N.F.L. Players Trading Their Helmets for Scrubs
## 6 A Pilgrim Route in Norway: Berries, Bogs and a Viking King
##                                   byline section published_date
## 1        By Anna Maltby and Theodore Tae    Well     2025-10-18
## 2                        By Maureen Dowd Opinion     2025-10-25
## 3 By Scott Cacciola and K.K. Rebecca Lai   Style     2025-10-21
## 4                       By Jamelle Bouie Opinion     2025-10-22
## 5                         By Jancee Dunn    Well     2025-10-19
## 6                      By Marta Giaccone  Travel     2025-10-23
##                                                                                         url
## 1                https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/well/move/ankle-mobility-exercises.html
## 2    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/opinion/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition.html
## 3 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/21/style/kilian-jornet-72-mountain-peaks.html
## 4   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/opinion/no-kings-trump-declaration-independence.html
## 5                           https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/well/nfl-players-nurses.html
## 6       https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/travel/norway-pilgrimage-route-st-olav-ways.html

6. Conclusion

Using the New York Times Most Popular API, I successfully retrieved data on the most emailed articles from the past seven days. By connecting to the API through R, I was able to extract and organize JSON data into a clean DataFrame containing each article’s title, author, section, date, and link.

Through the New York Times Most Popular API, I explored which articles gained the most attention over the past week. Most top-emailed pieces were from the Opinion and Health sections, highlighting trending readers interests.