Free & open source

Free tools for newsrooms

Two open-source diagnostics — free, live, and the open door into JATO. No login, no sales call. Point them at any site and get a plain-English report.

(live at tools.onlinejourno.com)

The two tools

Web Bloat Checker — point it at any page and see what’s slowing it down and who’s watching the reader: surveillance trackers (a curated database of 100+), unused JavaScript and CSS, asset bloat, and the third-party request cascade. Two scores: Page Health and Privacy.
Open source (MIT) · live now. → Try it · GitHub

Crawl-Budget Analyser — see your publication the way search engines and AI crawlers actually do: which sections they reach, which they’ve quietly written off, and where your site’s structure works against your editorial priorities — with plain-English fixes to hand the dev team.
Open source (MIT) · live now. → Try it · GitHub

Why they’re free — and open

Most newsroom technology is built by engineers at news organisations, for news organisations. This isn’t that. These tools were built by a journalist, and they are fully open source (MIT) — read every line, run them yourself, fork them, send a fix.

They solve editorial problems wearing a technical costume: a section that’s vital but structurally invisible to crawlers; a reader’s data leaking to ad-networks while the page crawls to load. Problems the newsroom should be able to see — so we made them free to see.

If you write code and care how journalism survives the next decade, this is an on-ramp. → Contribute on GitHub

How they fit

These are the public, open-source diagnostic capabilities of JATO — the same kind of intelligence The Audit and OnlineJourno Newsroom bring to bear, here free and standalone. Start with a free tool; there’s a whole library behind it.