Note: If you’re interested in open source and heading to SRCCON in Minneapolis next week, be sure to check out Emilia Ruzicka and Joe Germuska’s session on the subject: “Putting the Open back in Source.”
A few months ago, the Open Journalism Bot flagged a new repository from Schibsted, the Scandinavian media group, called Videofy Minimal. It turns a written article into a short video, with narration, captions, and animated graphics. I wrote it up in the March 14 update, before even Schibsted’s own press release.
Videofy Minimal has since become the most-starred recent project we track. As of this writing it has 630 GitHub stars and 117 forks. That’s roughly seventeen times as many as the next-most-starred repository among the more than 390 news organizations we follow.
I asked Juan Carlos Lopez Calvet, Schibsted’s director of data and AI and the project’s lead, why it caught on.
“The tool is highly valued by all newsrooms,” he said. “It drastically reduces production time and reuses already-produced content to publish as video in seconds. Journalists don’t need to be video experts, and we can convert any existing article into a new format very quickly.”
Schibsted built Videofy Minimal inside VG, its Oslo tabloid, and rolled it out across the group before releasing the code under an Apache 2.0 license. Its announcement called the release “an invitation to collaborate.” Lopez framed open source as a matter of industry self-interest.
“Open-sourcing benefits the industry as a whole,” he said. “We gain more by collaborating on knowledge and tooling than by competing against each other. Our competitors are now external entities, so we should move forward as an industry together.”
Lopez says newsrooms have reached out directly for help — “all the way to Latin America” — and that some have integrated Videofy Minimal into their content-management systems. Most of that feedback has come through back channels rather than pull requests, but the fork graph tells its own story.
Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten built a fork that fetches articles from its site, swaps in the paper’s brand and fonts, batch-generates videos from its top stories, and normalizes text for text-to-speech.
Slovakia’s Petit Press, publisher of SME.sk, translated the default prompts from Norwegian to Slovak, wired in brand configurations for its titles, and set up its own deployment. Both sets of changes are committed in the open, on top of Schibsted’s original.
The single most active fork added a timeline editor, animated bar-and-line chart renderers, caption animation, and music dubbing across 51 commits. It came from a personal account belonging to someone who appears to work at a major European newsroom. I’d love to see those changes come back to the project as pull requests!
Others, including Abu Dhabi’s The National and Québec’s CN2i cooperative, forked it without making public changes. There are likely many more newsrooms helped by the code release among the nearly ten-dozen forks.
If you’re on the fence about whether open sourcing a project is worth the effort, consider how much of the industry has already been helped by the Videofy Minimal project.