A little late this week, as I’m writing from vacation in the Adirondacks.
First, in case you missed it: earlier this month I published a standalone piece on Schibsted’s Videofy, the most-starred newsroom project so far this year. It’s a small case study in why open-sourcing pays off.
There was also a fresh crop of public repositories from news organizations over the past fortnight — new data releases, a rebuilt classic, and a newsroom voter guide built on another newsroom’s open code. Highlights below.
Highlights
Northwestern University’s Knight Lab began a ground-up rebuild of TimelineJS, the legendary tool for embeddable interactive timelines. Joe Germuska‘s rewrite is a Svelte 5 monorepo — a timeline player, an authoring tool and an embed package — and it adds support for the AT Protocol behind BlueSky, so timelines can be authored and stored on decentralized infrastructure rather than Google Sheets.
The Data Liberation Project published hospital adverse-event records that it obtained from four states — California, Colorado, Michigan and Washington — through public-records requests, geocoded and bundled into a SQLite database you can browse through a local Datasette app using a handy makefile. MuckRock data reporter Dillon Bergin and colleagues assembled each state’s return alongside data dictionaries and a set of SQL queries for comparing patient-safety incidents across the four. It’s an early release, and more public-records requests are pending. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of MuckRock.)
CBS News open-sourced a heat-forecast pipeline by John Kelly that turns government weather data into map-ready files for tracking extreme heat. It pulls NOAA forecast grids twice a day via GitHub Actions and renders maximum temperature, “feels-like” heat and dangerous overnight lows into CSV and GeoJSON, publishing a live MapLibre map. The repo ships a CLAUDE.md, and most of its commits are co-credited to Claude Code, with a handful from GitHub Copilot.
Germany’s Deutsche Welle published the data and methodology behind a project examining 250 years of U.S. engagement with the world. Compiled by Gianna-Carina Grün and the DW data team, it draws together Tufts University’s Military Intervention Project, a treaty dataset from Measuring American Diplomacy, and global-perception surveys from Nira Data and Gallup. The repo documents the analytical choices, such as how intervention objectives were recoded and how historical eras were matched to years. DW also published a graphical story using the data by Grün and Peter Hille.
Minnesota’s Sahan Journal built an interactive voter guide for the Hennepin County Attorney race, letting readers compare candidates’ answers through a quiz-style interface with content synced from Google Docs via ArchieML. It’s adapted from the open “Meet Your Mayor” template that The City Reporter built — another example of a newsroom building openly on another newsroom’s open work (I used to work at The City Reporter and was involved in one of the generations of the Meet Your Mayor project).
The South Florida Sun Sentinel opened a 2026 election tracker that pulls federal and state candidate filings and campaign-finance figures on a daily GitHub Actions schedule. David Schutz‘s Python scripts assemble candidate rosters and fundraising totals into region-by-region and statewide pages.
The Associated Press revived and modernized datakit, the data team’s pluggable command-line toolkit for managing a data project’s whole life cycle — scaffolding a repo from templates, syncing files to S3, and wiring up GitHub or GitLab. First built in 2017 and dormant since 2022, it got a thorough working-over from Larry Fenn, who repackaged the core and its five standard plugins around uv, added a config command and release tooling, and shipped a new all-in-one bundle. In the same spirit of newsrooms owning their tooling, Norway’s public broadcaster NRK replaced a compromised third-party GitHub Action with semrel, its own single-binary, cryptographically signed tool for automating software releases.
Germany’s ZEIT Online opened a planning-poker app that Manuel Sanchez built for teams to estimate tickets together — open a room, everyone picks a card, the moderator reveals them all at once — over a SvelteKit frontend with a realtime WebSocket layer.
American Public Media published a vertical-video carousel for YouTube Shorts and TikTok-style 9:16 clips, built as a framework-free web component with a thin React wrapper so it drops into any of the newsroom’s sites.
The data-visualization studio Kiln shared a Flourish template starter kit for building custom chart templates with AI coding agents. Instead of writing template code by hand, a developer describes the chart — ideally with a sample image and data — and an agent like Claude Code or Codex builds it against the included SDK reference files. The studio calls it early-stage, but pitches it as a way to extend Flourish beyond its built-in chart types.
By the Numbers
Beyond new repos, 85 news organizations made a combined 4,171 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 | 990 |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | 528 |
| Reuters Graphics | 220 |
| ICIJ | 213 |
| The Pudding | 191 |
| MuckRock | 128 |
| OpenSanctions | 124 |
| Buried Signals | 122 |
| NRK | 104 |
| The Associated Press | 89 |
This roundup is assembled with the help of open-journalism-bot, which monitors public GitHub activity from ~360 news organizations and posts new repositories to @openjournalism.news on BlueSky. Commit counts shown here exclude commits we identified as automated.