Welcome to Open Newswire – a consolidated feed of different news outlets which publish articles under Creative Commons or similar licences.
Some of these outlets are known for doing this, such as ProPublica in the US, or The Conversation in Australia, and their articles are widely shared by mainstream publications. However many more publications allow and even encourage us to republish their articles, despite not many people being aware of this.
We have scoured the web for these kinds of publications – everything from public interest projects, to magazines, state broadcasters and more – and aggregated them into feeds in 84 different languages. While one publication on its own is hardly a newswire, the thinking here is that if you have enough publications of different scopes and sizes from different parts of the world, the end result is something quite comprehensive and more useful than an editor just browsing a specific website for content to republish.
Users can select a language from the left-hand side. There’s also a search bar at the top of the page to find recent articles about a specific topic.
Open Newswire is far from perfect. Many languages only have one or two news sources. Some people might find some of the sources too politically charged, or too trivial, or too boring. But it’s a tool designed for editors and journalists, not the public. So far best-served languages in terms of the quality and quantity of content are English, Spanish, Portuguese and Farsi. The feeds in French, Hindi and Arabic are also quite strong.
We stress: the goal here isn’t and never will be to make money. Open Newswire was absolutely not created to peddle other hard-working journalists’ incredible work. This is more about connecting articles with editors/journalists across borders and continets. Open Newswire will never replace, say, a Reuters subscription. But for a smaller newsroom, it can help plug gaps in regional, national and especially international coverage in a way which is both timely and free of charge.
If you’ve made it this far, we’d really love to hear what you think! It’s very early days, and there are still features which need to be added. But for now, we have a proof-of-concept to play around with whih can maybe help some editors along the way.
Stay tuned for updates. We hope to add some more blog posts explaining how to use Open Newswire in the coming weeks.
Cheers!