GitHub for journalists

SDS 236

Ben Baumer

Smith College

2025-02-11

Why?

Journalists use GitHub

“In a lot of cases, journalists and programmers need to figure out how to hang out in each other’s worlds better,” Eads said. As more journalists embrace GitHub as a way to improve stories, they’ll develop a new kind of news community, centered around collaboration and code.

–David Eads (Chicago Tribune)

Examples

Foreign Government Donations to Large Think Tanks

Learn more

R for Journalists

A site from Andrew Ba Tran of the Washington Post.

For reproducing good work and experimenting with new techniques.

Journalists use GitHub for blogs

Ex: Lisa Williams blog

The blog uses Jekyll, a blogging system that creates a static site (look, Ma, no database!) and hosted on Github Pages.

I…create a new Markdown file for each post.

I publish new posts using Git, committing the changes and pushing them to Github. The site mirrors the gh-pages branch of this repository.

We will write in Markdown

Markdown:

can be used for everything
is portable
is platform independent
is future proof
is everywhere

Markdown is versatile

We will use GitHub for a blog

Fork quarto-blog repo
Open a new branch for your new story
Create a new file posts/<your-story-name>/index.md
Write the story, commit changes
Open new pull request
Receive feedback and update story
I will merge pull request and publish story
See example post: “How to write for this blog”

Your choice

You can do all of the previous steps using only your web browser!
If you prefer:
- Clone the repo and work locally
- Push to your fork

Let’s get started!