In the past two weeks, 16 news organizations created or opened 19 public repositories on GitHub.
Highlights
ProPublica released a Creative Commons licensed dataset of 4,700+ federal court cases from New Mexico and West Texas involving immigrants charged with illegal entry who also faced military trespass charges. The data shows that roughly 60% of resolved cases ended in dismissal or dropped charges. The data was used in ProPublica’s reporting on the Trump administration’s legal strategy for prosecuting border crossers.
Bellingcat published the code behind a Google Earth Engine map that detects structural damage across Iran using Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR satellite imagery. The project compares a 12-month pre-conflict baseline against a rolling post-conflict window, overlaid on Microsoft Building Footprints, to identify likely destruction. An accompanying post goes deep into the methodology.
Deutsche Welle published the methodology, data and code behind their analysis of how Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs affected global trade flows. The analysis, by Kira Schacht, uses ITC Trade Map import data to track which countries gained or lost trade during different phases of tariff implementation, from early 2025 stockpiling through import substitution patterns.
The Telegraph published script-to-video, a tool that converts narrative scripts paired with slide images into narrated videos. It offers 400+ multilingual voices via Microsoft Edge TTS, supports PNG/PowerPoint/Google Slides input, includes 45+ transitions with callout annotations, and generates subtitles and thumbnails automatically.
ABC News Australia released the code behind an interactive map visualizing oil tanker shipment origins by port using 2025 and 2026 shipping data.
Buried Signals published coJournalist, an open-source local news monitoring platform that lets newsrooms create customizable “scouts” tracking web pages, news outlets, search queries, social media, and APIs with email alerts. Built on SvelteKit, Python FastAPI, and AWS infrastructure (Lambda, EventBridge, DynamoDB).
PRX published eas-detect, a tool that identifies Emergency Alert System tones in audio files, returning structured JSON with decoded alert information and time codes. It supports various audio formats and includes sensitive detection modes for finding EAS signals buried under speech or music.
OpenSanctions published ftm-stmt (which also seems to be called ftm-inspect), a terminal-UI tool for comparing versions of OpenSanctions data files. It provides a text-based interface for diffing .pack files with search functionality and the ability to compare local files against live datasets.
Full Fact published a Python data pipeline that transforms Democracy Club candidate data into structured JSON for use in Full Fact’s AI fact-checking tools, covering candidates from the May 2026 UK elections.
Tampa Bay Times published TropQuiz, the code behind their interactive quiz about the history of Tropicana Field, built for the Rays’ return to the stadium for their first game since the 2024 season. Questions cover the stadium’s original name, teams that have played there, retired numbers, and the new roof.
By the Numbers
Beyond new repos, 76 news organizations made a combined 4,213 public commits to GitHub during this period. The most active by commit count (excluding, as best we can, commits done by bots, gh-actions, or cron):
| Organization | Commits |
|---|---|
| The Guardian | 663 |
| Bellingcat | 460 |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | 323 |
| OpenSanctions | 315 |
| The Economist | 229 |
| Bloomberg | 206 |
| OpenStates | 196 |
| ICIJ | 151 |
| PRX | 134 |
| ABC News (Australia) | 102 |
Data comes from the Open Journalism Bot, which monitors ~360 news organization GitHub accounts. Follow @openjournalism.bsky.social for real-time alerts. Total public commit count includes automated commits.