CBS 60 Minutes Transcript Scraper — Interview Archive

60 Minutes transcripts average 5,000–30,000 words of on-the-record Q&A per segment, with consistent correspondent and speaker-label fields across the archive. This actor scrapes full interview transcripts from CBS News 60 Minutes — one record per segment: headline, correspondent, broadcast date, speaker-labeled body text, and topic metadata. Discovers transcript pages automatically from the CBS News article sitemap. Video-only segments without a published transcript are skipped.

What's included and what isn't

60 Minutes airs approximately 45 episodes per US broadcast season, with 3–4 segments per episode. Roughly 50–70% of segments have a published transcript — the remainder are video-only. This scraper covers transcript-bearing segments only, makes that boundary explicit in every record (is_transcript: true), and skips video-only pages entirely. The active transcript archive covers approximately 5 years back, with sparser coverage for earlier seasons.

What does the CBS 60 Minutes Transcript Scraper do?

Discovery walks the CBS News sitemap index at cbsnews.com/xml-sitemap/index.xml, filtering monthly article sitemaps for two URL patterns:

• /news/<slug>-60-minutes-transcript/ — primary transcript pattern
• /news/read-the-full-transcript-of-<slug>/ — extended interview variant

Metadata is parsed from JSON-LD NewsArticle blocks on each page. Transcript body text lives in <section class="content__body"> as <p> tags, with ad wrappers stripped before extraction. Speaker labels are extracted from paragraph-leading Name: patterns in both Title Case and ALL-CAPS formats. No headless browser or proxy required.

What data does it extract?

Field	Type	Description
story_slug	string	URL slug of the transcript page
story_title	string	Article headline
story_url	string	Canonical CBS News URL
aired_date	string	Broadcast date (YYYY-MM-DD)
published_date	string	CBS News publish timestamp (ISO 8601)
segment_type	string	Inferred type: interview, investigation, or profile
correspondent	string	CBS News correspondent (e.g. Major Garrett, Lesley Stahl)
subjects	string	Interviewed subjects extracted from speaker labels (comma-separated)
synopsis	string	Article meta description
body_html	string	Full transcript HTML preserving Q&A paragraph structure
body_text	string	Plain-text version of the transcript
speakers	string	All speaker labels found in the transcript (comma-separated)
is_transcript	boolean	Always true — non-transcripts are skipped
has_video_only_variant	boolean	True when a paired video-only story exists
related_story_urls	string	Related CBS News links on the page (comma-separated)
topics	string	CBS News topic tags (comma-separated)
canonical_url	string	Canonical URL from page head
source	string	Fixed: cbsnews.com/60-minutes
scraped_at	datetime	ISO 8601 scrape timestamp

How to use it

{
  "maxItems": 1,
  "startUrls": [
    {"url": "https://www.cbsnews.com/news/netanyahu-us-israel-iran-60-minutes-transcript/"}
  ]
}

Scrapes a specific episode transcript.

{
  "maxItems": 200,
  "startDate": "2025-01"
}

Scrapes all 60 Minutes transcripts published from January 2025 onward (up to 200 records).

{ "maxItems": 1000 }

Full archive crawl — returns all available transcripts across the active archive.

Field	Type	Description
maxItems	integer	Required. Maximum transcript records to scrape
startDate	string	Optional. Limit discovery to sitemaps from this month onward (YYYY-MM format)
startUrls	array	Optional. Direct CBS News transcript URLs — skips sitemap discovery when provided

Pricing

Charged per transcript record scraped. A 200-transcript run at the 1.2x coefficient on the default_2603_basic profile costs approximately $0.35 ($0.10 start + $0.00125 per record × 200 records).

Use cases

• Media and political research — build a structured corpus of 60 Minutes interviews with heads of state, CEOs, and scientists spanning multiple years
• NLP corpora — long-form Q&A transcripts with consistent speaker labeling are well-suited for dialog modeling, summarization, or entity extraction
• Journalism datasets — index correspondent names, broadcast dates, and topics across the archive to analyze coverage patterns or research specific subjects
• RAG pipelines — ingest high-quality, on-the-record interview text as a retrieval source for investigative journalism or policy research applications
• Academic research — track how specific topics (foreign policy, corporate governance, public health) are covered on network news over time

FAQ

Why is coverage 50–70% rather than 100%?

CBS News publishes transcripts for most but not all 60 Minutes segments. Some segments are video-only by editorial choice, particularly shorter news-break items and some documentary segments. The is_transcript field and the URL-pattern filter ensure only genuine transcript pages are returned.

Can I scrape by correspondent?

The input does not have a correspondent filter, but every record returns the correspondent field. Fetch the relevant date range and filter downstream by correspondent name.

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Results export as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Apify dataset view.