It was a pretty quiet fortnight: 13 news organizations created or opened public repositories on GitHub.
Highlights
USA Today published a freezing-days analysis covering 1956–2025 daily minimum temperature data, finding that 255 of 257 U.S. cities with populations over 100,000 now experience fewer freezing days per water year than they did in the 1950s, with the cold season starting 11 days later and ending 26 days earlier on average. The repo includes a R Markdown notebook documenting their methodology, summary CSVs by city and county, and time-series outputs that back the very well done interactive story. The data analysis is by Ignacio Calderon.
ABC News Australia released pricing data extracted from court filings at the heart of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s case against retailer Woolworths for misleading pricing practices. The ACCC, Australia’s consumer watchdog, alleges that the supermarket misled customers by briefly inflating regular prices on hundreds of products before marking them “down” to a higher price. The dataset, compiled by Simon Elvery of ABC News Story Lab for his reporting on the trial, tracks the regular, spike, and “Prices Dropped” prices for items including the Oreo Family Pack, Tim Tams, and Lucky Dog Bones.
Buried Signals released Spotlight, a runtime-agnostic OSINT investigation system for journalists that runs on Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI, plus OpenAI-compatible local models like Ollama and LM Studio. It bundles 11 skills covering web archiving, social media intelligence, and financial investigations behind an investigation pipeline with independent fact-checking.
MuckRock published a Chrome extension that adds a sidebar letting users hover over page elements to capture their CSS selectors and text content for use in Klaxon, their website-change-monitoring tool. It’s an evolution of MuckRock’s earlier bookmarklet for Klaxon. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of MuckRock.)
The Guardian published vibecoding-puzzle-lab, an experimental “10% project” exploring whether LLMs can be prompted to generate puzzle ideas safe for public consumption. The repo includes a small web app for uploading and downloading prompts and outputs to S3.
By the Numbers
Beyond new repos, 76 news organizations made a combined 4,831 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 | 1,031 |
| OpenSanctions | 427 |
| Bloomberg | 381 |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | 315 |
| ABC News (US) | 286 |
| ICIJ | 278 |
| Spotlight PA | 142 |
| OpenStates | 138 |
| Buried Signals | 126 |
| The Economist | 114 |
Data comes from the Open Journalism Bot, which monitors ~360 news organization GitHub accounts. Follow @openjournalism.bsky.social for real-time alerts. Commit counts shown here exclude commits we identified as automated (gh-actions, scrapers, dependabot, etc.).