In the first two full weeks of the year, 16 news organizations created or opened 28 public repositories on GitHub.
Highlights
Inside Climate News published the data and R code behind their investigation into how the fracking boom put oil tank batteries in the Guadalupe River floodplain in Texas. The analysis uses FEMA flood hazard data and Railroad Commission of Texas well records to identify tanks at risk. By Peter Aldhous and Dylan Baddour.
ICIJ released caul, a Python automatic speech recognition library built on NVIDIA’s Parakeet multilingual models with Whisper.cpp fallback for unsupported languages. Designed for transcribing audio files in cross-border investigations.
The City open-sourced data and analysis code from four investigations: rad-violations, examining NYC housing code violations at properties transferred under the NYCHA RAD/PACT program; voter-turnout, analyzing demographic patterns in New York City’s 2025 local election; kyd, aggregating demographic, voting, and income data by City Council district for their “Get to Know Your District” app; and SI-buses, investigating MTA bus service on Staten Island. All four were published by data fellow Mia Hollie.
Freedom of the Press Foundation released dangerzone-rs, an experimental Rust rewrite of DangerZone’s core document-sanitizing utilities with Python bindings. They also released dz-rekor-monitor, a GitHub Action that monitors Sigstore transparency logs for suspicious signing events related to DangerZone releases, and securedrop-protocol-models, formal security proofs for the SecureDrop encrypted communication protocol using the Tamarin prover.
The Guardian released interactive-style-library, which extracts design tokens and UI components from the Guardian’s Source design system and makes them available as CSS and JavaScript files for non-React projects. It includes specialized features for news content like political party colors and chart styling. They also released blueprint-swift-models, Swift protobuf models for communication between their mobile apps API and native iOS app.
The Pudding released the code behind two projects: kpop-generations is the code behind their story that tries to define K-pop generations, and happy-map is the code behind “100,000 moments of human happiness, mapped.”
ABC News Australia released components-storylab, a collection of reusable Svelte components for interactive journalism including MapLibre mapping, dark mode iframe integration, and branded typography.
BBC Data Unit published the data and methodology behind their investigation into drug treatment for young people, by Paul Bradshaw.
KFF released kff-medicare-plan-analysis, R code for analyzing Medicare Advantage and Part D plan availability and enrollment.
Data comes from the Open Journalism Bot, which monitors ~350 news organization GitHub accounts. Follow @openjournalism.bsky.social for real-time alerts.