Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Managing News released its open-source code. It is the first out of six Drupal projects funded through the Knight Drupal Initiative to do so.

Managing News is a news and data aggregator that also maps and charts the information it collects to let users visualize the news. It can help teams scattered across cities, communities or people around the world share news and information. It can also be used as a news hub to show news on a given topic (think Google News, but focused on a topic or local community and with stories shown on a map). It has been packaged as a "product" so that any person or organization can quickly set it up on a web server.

It is also built to be fully extensible and used for other data aggregation and visualization purposes.  For instance, it has been extended by one group and is currently being used to visualize voting data for every province and district in Afghanistan as part of that country's runoff presidential election.

Below are examples of projects that could now be more easily done using Managing News:

D.C. bikes Map

Stumble Safely

Food Security Portal

Knight Journalism Tracker

H1N1 News Tracking

To download the code visit: http://managingnews.com/download or Drupal.org.

We thank the Drupal community for partnering with us to speed media innovation through the creative use of the free, open-source technology in communications.

Bill Fitzgerald, Knight Foundation grantee and alpha tester of Managing News, wrote a post about the project, "An Early Look At Managing News", where you can see step by step how the application works.