In the first two weeks of March, 18 news organizations created or opened 21 public repositories on GitHub.
Highlights
IRE/NICAR released both the backend and frontend for the new archive.ire.org site. It’s an invaluable resource covering decades of investigative journalism resources — tipsheets, contest entries, transcripts, datasets, and training materials from IRE conferences.
Schibsted, the Norwegian media conglomerate, released videofy_minimal, a tool that automatically transforms news articles into short videos for digital signage screens. It fetches content, generates a manuscript, matches visuals, creates AI voiceover (via ElevenLabs), and renders final video — with a human-in-the-loop CMS where editors review and approve before publishing. This release removes Schibsted-specific internal integrations so it’s useful for any newsroom.
Freedom of the Press Foundation released dangerzone-image, the containerized core of their Dangerzone project, which converts potentially malicious documents into safe image files inside a sandbox — helpful for newsrooms that handle documents from unknown sources.
ABC News Australia released interactive-alt-fallbacks, a utility that automatically generates screen-reader-friendly text alternatives for interactive graphics and scrollytelling stories. It uses an image alt-text to replace a visible image with one that is screen-reader accessible.
Decoherence Media released epstein-network, a toolkit for analyzing large photo collections and mapping Jeffrey Epstein’s social networks. It uses AWS Rekognition to detect faces, cluster identities, and generate network visualizations of who appears together in photographs.
CBC Radio-Canada released vq-analysis, a command-line toolkit for video quality analysis and evaluation. It computes quality metrics and generates rate-distortion plots to compare encoder configurations.
Zeit Online released deutschland_spricht, the graph partitioning code behind their “Deutschland spricht” project, which matches people with opposing political views for one-on-one conversations. The repo contains balanced max-cut algorithms — the math that determines who talks to whom.
Ukrainian data journalism outfit Texty.org.ua released inspiration_list, a Slack bot and browsable web gallery that collects data visualization and journalism links shared in their newsroom Slack channel. It scrapes URLs, fetches metadata and thumbnails, and publishes a searchable, categorized inspiration board.
The Guardian released promo-generator, a React tool for creating promotional images for articles. Guardian staff can paste a Guardian URL and the app fetches the article via their API, letting them compose and download a social media graphic with drag, zoom, and text overlay.
City Bureau continues expanding its City Scrapers network, adding Las Cruces, N.M. and Charlotte, N.C. to its growing list of cities with automated public-meeting scrapers.
By the Numbers
Beyond new repos, 75 news organizations made a combined 4,692 public commits to GitHub during this period. (We did our best to exclude automated commits done by gh-actions or cron). The most active by commit count:
| Organization | Commits |
|---|---|
| The Guardian | 1,461 |
| Bellingcat | 644 |
| Bloomberg | 290 |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | 262 |
| Financial Times | 220 |
| ABC News (Australia) | 168 |
| Spotlight PA | 123 |
| PRX | 110 |
| NZZ Storytelling | 92 |
| OpenNews | 85 |
This is the first edition of the Open Journalism biweekly update. Data comes from the Open Journalism Bot, which monitors ~350 news organization GitHub accounts. Follow @openjournalism.bsky.social for real-time alerts.