Building an inclusive, independent, open newsroom

Working at the intersection of news and open source.

I didn’t make a big announcement about it, but for the last few months I’ve been working as the CTO at The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that reports on stories at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy.

It was a necessary move for me: I needed stronger work/life balance for my own health, and I also wanted to feel like I was helping in the midst of a very tumultuous social and political climate. It was also a move back into the core ideas my career has been built on.

The 19th was launched in January 2020 by veterans of the Texas Tribune and ProPublica who understood the need to report stories from a more diverse perspective than is normally offered by an industry still dominated by white men. I’ve been following it from the beginning as a prominent subscription in my RSS reader, and was deeply impressed by the detailed, empathetic, unsensational reporting.

The 19th’s technical platform is largely based on self-hosted WordPress, with some interesting theme modifications that allow for visualizations and in-page interactivity. (Did I immediately add simple microformats support to articles as soon as I arrived? Yes, I did.) Importantly for me, the team cares about the same privacy issues I do: particularly in an environment where abortion-related surveillance is becoming a safety issue, dealing with audience data intentionally is crucial.

Openness is core to what The 19th is. Its financial backers are published in full, so you know exactly whose is bankrolling the non-profit. Since the beginning, the newsroom has also made its content available via a Creative Commons license that allows anyone else to republish it for free. Those partners have included the Guardian, USA Today, Teen Vogue, PBS NewsHour, Ms. Magazine, RawStory, and many more. It could be you, too, if you wanted to: you can find the full HTML source to republish on every article page. Because The 19th’s newsroom is more diverse, every republished article furthers its mission of improving representation in the news media overall.

It’s an obvious extension to this strategy to make our technology available as well, via a permissive open source license. That’s my…