klaxon | Klaxon enables reporters and editors to monitor scores | Browser Plugin library

Klaxon is open source software built in the newsroom of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news organization covering the American criminal justice system. It was created by a team of three—Ivar Vong, Andy Rossback and Tom Meagher—and it is subject to the kind of shortcomings any young, small side project might encounter. It may break unexpectedly. It may miss a change in a website, or an email might not fire off correctly. Still, we’ve found it immensely useful in our daily reporting. We want other journalists to benefit from Klaxon and to help us improve it, but keep these caveats in mind and use it at your own risk. Our team will keep hacking on Klaxon in spare moments, and we plan to keep it humming for our own use. But we think this project has the potential to help just about any newsroom. For it to succeed and to evolve, it will depend on the contributions from other journalist-developers. We are excited about the prospect of building a community around this project to help maintain it. So when you spot the inevitable bug, please let us know. And if you’d like to help us make this better, or add new functionality to it, we’d love to have your help.
One of our goals for Klaxon is to make it as easy as possible for reporters and editors without tech backgrounds to use and to set up. Getting your own Klaxon running in your newsroom will require you to run a handful of instructions one time through the help of online services Heroku and Github. Following these directions, it should take maybe 10 minutes to set up your Klaxon, including the time to create accounts on Heroku and Github if you need to. We use Heroku to deploy software in The Marshall Project newsroom. We think it makes some of the tedious work of running servers a lot easier to deal with, so we designed Klaxon to be easily deployable on Heroku. (If you’d like to run this in your newsroom’s preferred server setup — say using Docker or a Linux machine — we encourage you to do so, and to send it back to us, with documentation, in a pull request.) If you want to use our setup, you’ll need to create an account with Heroku, if you don’t already have one.