How newsroom tech shapes the stories we read online

“What is CMS?” a friend from the tech industry asked. I had mentioned the content management system we use in the newsroom. The question took me back to the first time someone from the tech world dropped “UI-UX” in a sentence, roughly a decade ago, and I stopped them to ask what it meant, thus learning about the concept of user interface and user experience. Pausing techies mid-thought to unpack acronyms and jargon from their trade is routine for any reporter. But this was the first time that someone from the tech world had asked me to explain a technology term from mine: journalism.

I first worked on a CMS in 2011. Then again briefly during the pandemic at another newsroom, and now, most recently at Lounge. Three different systems: each distinct yet similar enough for one to do a comparative analysis to map their strengths and weaknesses, note workflow bottlenecks, register UI-UX irritants. Yet, it has never occurred to me to do that, which is strange because with consumer internet apps we use every day, I do exactly that. Yet that same analytical lens had not turned inward, toward the tools that decide how our own work is uploaded, formatted, and eventually seen online.

A few days later, I chanced upon a piece laying out the history of newsrooms going digital, a transformation as old as the consumer internet itself. Titled Journalism Lost Its Culture of Sharing, the piece by Scott Klein and Ben Welsh was published in January in Source, a platform documenting “the work of developers, designers, and journalists who build journalism’s technical backbone”. The piece traces how newsrooms once actively shared code on GitHub—the platform where web developers collaborate and share open-source code.

I have written stories on and around GitHub in the past, unbeknownst to the presence of repositories from my line of work hosted on it. At its peak, The New York Times released dozens of public repositories every year. In 2024, it released none. In 2016, news organisations collectively published over 2,000 public GitHub projects. By 2024, that number had dropped to under 400—an 80% decline, owing to economic pressures and organisational shift, according to the article.

That doesn’t change the fact that every thoughtfully designed longform piece one has read online—with smooth-scrolling narratives, data visualisations, interactive images—is a web developer’s labour. Perhaps built on tools shared by other newsrooms, shaped by a global culture of collaboration in journo-tech that one barely noticed while benefiting from it. For instance, in 2003, developers at the Lawrence Journal-World, a local newspaper in Kansas, built a tool to manage their move online. That tool, called Django, a Python web framework, went on to power the first version of Instagram, the article noted.

I have since started looking at Indian news websites with a new lens: reverse-engineering them to see which open-source repository of an international newsroom they are inspired from. Code-sharing is far more essential for my industry now, when resources are scarce and challenges existential. Thankfully, the article offers workarounds: “assign open-source editors, make contributions count toward promotions, share AI experiments and methodologies, recognise outstanding work with awards”. Small steps that could rebuild what economics has eroded.