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Friday Deep-Dive
GitHub, explained for people who do not code
On the internet, there is a place where thousands of genuinely useful programs are available at no cost, created by people who chose to release them freely. A few were made by newsrooms. You have very likely never visited it, since it appears to have been designed entirely for programmers. Its name is GitHub, and this week I want to show you the way in. No coding, I promise. Just four things: what it is, how to distinguish a good tool from one that has been abandoned, how to download one, and three worth trying this week, including a free program that will send you an email the moment your city publishes its agenda.
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The free tool store you have been walking past
Imagine a hardware shop in which every tool costs nothing, and the builder has left the blueprints on a shelf. That is GitHub. Large corporations store projects there, and so do outlets such as The Marshall Project and Stanford's Big Local News, which create reporting tools and then release them for others to use. The problem has never been the cost; rather, the site appears to have been made for programmers, so publishers tend to overlook it. In truth, it is easier than it seems. What it calls a project folder is a repository, and you can size one up in roughly fifteen seconds by looking at three items on the page; for most of them, downloading is no different from installing any other application. What follows is a straightforward guide, along with three free tools I checked myself, including one that sends an email the instant a government page is updated.
The tools that solve newspaper problems are rarely sold in a box with a sales rep attached. They were built by people at other newsrooms who had your exact problem, solved it, and handed it out. Nobody is ever going to market them to you, which is precisely why most publishers never find them. Twenty minutes of knowing your way around GitHub puts a whole shelf of free help within reach.
Read the full post →
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What is?
Repository
What it is: A repository, or “repo,” is simply one project's folder on GitHub. One repo, one tool. Inside it you will find the program's files, an instruction sheet called the README, and a running history of every change anyone has made to it. When somebody says “check out this repo,” they are saying “go look at this project's folder.” That is the whole word.
Why publishers care: Knowing that one word turns GitHub from a wall of jargon into a set of shelves you can browse. And once you can read a repo page, you can judge a free tool in about fifteen seconds: stars tell you how many people found it useful, the last-updated date tells you whether anyone still maintains it, and the README tells you whether it was written for normal humans. Those three checks are the difference between finding a gem and downloading something abandoned in 2019.
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Like what you see here, please forward to someone who you think would enjoy reading about AI in publishing!
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— Trevor
Trevor Slette
Co-founder, Quadd.ai · 28-year community publisher
trevors@quadd.ai
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Book a 15-min call
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LinkedIn
P.S. P.S. Reply with the one task at your paper that eats the most time every week. I will go look for a free tool that handles it, check whether it is actually still maintained, and send you the link either way.
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From meeting audio to usable copy.
Upload a council meeting, an interview, a coach's post-game scrum. Get a clean transcript and an AI summary, then ask Quadd to compose a first-draft story or paste your own prompt — formatted output in your publication's exact style. No more scrubbing through forty minutes of audio at 9pm because the lede quote was somewhere in the middle. Trained on the way reporters actually use audio, not the way podcast editors do.
See how transcription works →
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