GitHub for journalists

SDS 236

Ben Baumer

Smith College

Jan 30, 2026

Why?

Journalists use GitHub

Getting GitHub: Why journalists should know and use the social coding site

“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

A site from Andrew Ba Tran of the Washington Post.

For reproducing good work and experimenting with new techniques.

Journalists use GitHub for blogs

https://lisawilliams.github.io/lisa/

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

https://www.markdownguide.org/getting-started/

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

https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html

  • Clone sds236-s26-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”

Verify your GitHub token

  • First,
gitcreds::gitcreds_get()
<gitcreds>
  protocol: NA
  host    : NA
  username: NA
  password: <-- hidden -->
  • If necessary…
gitcreds::gitcreds_set()

Let’s get started!

Extra help