NewsArticle structured data

Definition: Schema.org's NewsArticle definition covers an article that reports news or provides background context and supporting material for understanding the news. NewsArticle is a subtype of Article in the Schema.org vocabulary used for structured data, a machine-readable description of page content.

Key facts

• Schema.org's type hierarchy places NewsArticle below Article and CreativeWork, so it inherits their properties.
• As of 17 October 2026, Google's Article documentation supports Article, NewsArticle and BlogPosting, with recommended properties and no required properties.
• Schema.org's author property accepts a Person or an Organization as the author of the content.

What makes an article a NewsArticle?

Schema.org's Markup for News guide explicitly includes background material in the definition. It gives an in-depth article about climate change or the European Union as examples for the more specific BackgroundNewsArticle type.

The same guide explains that content can qualify as NewsArticle even when it contains inaccuracies or combines opinion with factual claims. The type describes a category of content; editorial standards and transparency policies have their own properties, including publishingPrinciples.

Which fields describe attribution?

Schema.org's author definition identifies who creates the content. The NewsArticle property table defines publisher as the publisher of the article and accepts either an organization or a person. These fields describe separate roles, even when the same organization fills both.

The editor property identifies the person who edits the work. The contributor property describes a secondary contributor and accepts a person or an organization. The sourceOrganization property records the organization for which the creator works. That relationship differs from the publishing relationship expressed by publisher.

Google's author markup guidance recommends including every author shown on the page. Each author has a separate object, with Person or Organization as the type and a url or sameAs link that helps identify them. An author's biography page is one documented option. The author.name value contains the name alone; publisher names, job titles and introductory wording belong outside that value.

What does the markup look like, and how is it checked?

Google's structured data introduction describes JSON-LD as a notation embedded in an HTML script element. This example uses that format to describe a news article's author and publisher; the names and URLs are placeholders.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NewsArticle",
  "headline": "Example news headline",
  "author": [{
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Example Author",
    "url": "https://example.com/authors/example-author"
  }],
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Publisher"
  }
}
</script>

The same introduction recommends the Rich Results Test during development and URL Inspection to confirm that Google finds the markup on the page. Google's Article guide shows a NewsArticle example using the same author-object structure.

Related terms

• Article structured data
• JSON-LD
• Organization structured data
• Author byline

FAQ

Can an organization be the author?

Yes. Google's Article guide supports an Organization author and gives the organization's home page as an identity link. You can record the publisher separately with publisher.

How should multiple authors appear?

Give each author a separate object in the author array. The same Google guide recommends including all authors shown on the page and keeping their names in separate entries.

Does NewsArticle markup have to be present for Google News?

Google's guide says there is no markup requirement for eligibility for Google News features such as Top stories. It presents Article markup as a way to explain the page's content, author and title more explicitly.

Sources

1. Schema.org, "NewsArticle", undated
2. Schema.org, "Markup for News", undated
3. Schema.org, "author", undated
4. Schema.org, "contributor", undated
5. Google Search Central, "Article (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data", 8 September 2026
6. Google Search Central, "Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search", 10 December 2025

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