Hello Friends,
My name is Penelope. I am a citizen journalist, not the college kind but the kind with a passion to make change. The past year along with my articles I have been building a newsroom. At first I never imaged using ai for such a thing but as I researched resources like NPR, and The Knight Foundation I found AI was needed to enable change and compete in a modern agentic world.
I started out as The Penny Tribune, it grew bigger than just a starter blog writing about local events. I covered things like the Delaney Hall uprisings worked with sources on the ground during Operation Metro Surge and also analyzed events like the release of the Epstein files, ICE advancement with government contracts.
Most of my work has been manual but when I signed up for a claude subscription I started being amazed at what could be done. I created a theme for my site. Pretty basic but it still amazed me. Then I began automating fact checking and even having a small level intelligence platform that monitored rss feeds of international blogs and reddit. Now its kind of become its own beast.
tir labs, strange but named after the fundamental protein in our immune system. When I got tear gassed and flashbanged I knew journalists needed a defense. While not being able to fight back physical I looked for ways to do it online so journalists could have more protection before hand and be prepared for the field.
tir labs is a researched based non-profit open-source project to give journalists, newsrooms, researchers and activists a way to do their duties safer and more efficient the first is the worldwide intelligence monitor with 120 connectors that updates near millisecond speeds. The next is civontology which is the ontology for journalist to research everything from a local to worldwide level ingesting hundreds of thousands of objects a day while continuously finding more object “nets”.
The manual newsroom is called Postdated, labeled for after the fact of an event occurring and the agentic newsroom where it requires a person to edit a draft and fact check manually and then hit publish, then everything is done from the posts, to distribution to updating.
That is called The Diurna. The Diurna was a daily newspaper in ancient Rome. My catchphrase is “Sorry we’re later Caesar had a thing.” It is powered by opentir, the intelligence platform. The tir ontology for good. It also works with civontology to audit local towsna dn writes articles for important changes like resolution proposals, crime, and local events.
So thats me and what im working on.
and my githubs