Overtone News MCP Server

An MCP server that gives any agent real-time news plus the contextual intelligence to use it well — tone distribution, emerging stories, narrative shifts, spike alerts, and tone-over-time charts — powered by Overtone's publisher network.

Works with any MCP-compatible client: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, Kimi K2, and more.

What it looks like

Natural language queries — ask in plain English, get contextually analysed articles:

Global coverage analysis — compare tone across languages and regions:

Tone timeseries — track how a topic's emotional coverage shifts over time:

Why this exists

News APIs return articles. That's the easy part. The hard part is everything an agent actually needs to reason about current events:

• What's the tone of coverage on a topic — is the public mood angry, hopeful, informational, fearful?
• What's emerging right now that had zero coverage yesterday?
• Where is the narrative turning — which topics are shifting tone fastest?
• Is there a spike in anger or fear around something I'm watching?
• How has tone trended over time on a given story?

This server exposes all of that as MCP tools, so an agent can pull the right signal for the question it's been asked — not just a flat feed of headlines.

Install

The server ships as a Python package. uvx (from uv) runs it without cluttering your global Python. Install uv once:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Then add one block to your MCP client config. uvx fetches the package from PyPI and runs it on demand — no install step needed.

Claude Desktop

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or the equivalent on your platform:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "overtone-news": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["overtone-news-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

Edit ~/.config/claude-code/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "overtone-news": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["overtone-news-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor / Windsurf

Settings → MCP → Add server:

• Command: uvx
• Args: overtone-news-mcp

Codex

Edit ~/.codex/config.toml:

[[mcp_servers]]
name = "overtone-news"
command = "uvx"
args = ["overtone-news-mcp"]

Auth

On first tool call the server registers a free-tier API key with Overtone and caches it at ~/.overtone/credentials. The cache is shared with the Overtone News skill for Claude Code, so installing both won't double-register.

For a premium key (higher rate and daily limits), set OVERTONE_NEWS_API_KEY in the env block of your MCP config:

"overtone-news": {
  "command": "uvx",
  "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/CKBrennan/overtone-news-mcp", "overtone-news-mcp"],
  "env": { "OVERTONE_NEWS_API_KEY": "ot-prod-..." }
}

Rate limits:

To request a premium key, email business@overtone.ai.

Environment variables

Tools

All tools return JSON. The agent chooses which tool fits the user's question — you don't in

... View full README on GitHub