In the second half of February, 10 news organizations created or opened 12 public repositories on GitHub. Many were tied to the NICAR 2026 conference in Indianapolis.
Highlights
MuckRock released klaxon-extension, a Chrome extension that modernizes the original Klaxon bookmarklet for web page monitoring. The extension injects a sidebar into the current page — hover over elements to highlight them, click to lock a selection, and the sidebar displays the CSS selector for use in setting up web change alerts. They also released klaxon-sandbox, a companion repo with snapshot test fixtures, and nicar, Jupyter notebooks from their NICAR session on enhancing public records work with LLMs. (Note: I’m on the board at Muckrock.)
The Guardian made public stand, a design system and component library for their internal tooling. It’s split into two tiers: core components (buttons, forms, typography, color tokens) and specialized editorial components (byline editors, tag pickers). Built with React and TypeScript, with Storybook documentation at guardian.github.io/stand.
ABC News Australia opened chart-builder, a chart authoring and rendering system with three components: a builder interface for creating charts, an iframe viewer that renders from URL parameters, and a scrollyteller integration for their Odyssey interactive projects. They also released interactive-pill-text, a Svelte component that highlights keywords in articles with styled “pill” overlays supporting custom colors, borders, and icon badges.
Thomson Reuters released captrack, an evaluation framework for assessing “capability-level forgetting” in large language models after fine-tuning. CapTrack analyzes existing outputs to compute metrics across three dimensions: competence (what the model can do), behavior (what it will do), and execution (how well it performs).
IRE/NICAR published several conference repos: NICAR26-Intro-to-R, a three-hour beginner-friendly R workshop teaching journalists data import, filtering, grouping, and joining; and nicar-2026-local-guide, an HTML guide to food and attractions in Indianapolis for conference attendees.
By the Numbers
The most active organizations by public commit count, excluding (as much as possible) automated commits from GitHub Actions and cron jobs:
| Organization | Commits |
|---|---|
| The Guardian | 1,453 |
| Bellingcat | 440 |
| Bloomberg | 252 |
| PRX | 157 |
| Financial Times | 135 |
| ABC News (Australia) | 135 |
| Spotlight PA | 129 |
| The Pudding | 106 |
Data comes from the Open Journalism Bot, which monitors ~350 news organization GitHub accounts. Follow @openjournalism.bsky.social for real-time alerts.