How It Started
A year ago, our journey started with independent citizen journalism to tell working-class stories, funded simply through a Buy Me a Coffee link.
The reality of modern journalism quickly became apparent. Technology is prohibitively expensive for independent reporters. We were fighting a massive machine of for-profit news corporations with billions of dollars and unlimited resources, built to maximize engagement and enrich shareholders at the expense of objectivity.
Journalism is a public good. It shouldn’t be this hard to break into, and it shouldn’t be this hard to sustain.
Frustrated by tools that weren’t tailored for reporters, we set out to level the playing field. We began building an automated pipeline to research, write, and distribute the news faster. Over 300 iterations later, that hands-on process evolved into tir labs.
Why tir
We chose the name tir because we wanted journalists to have an immune system—a defense mechanism to protect the truth. In nature, TIR (Toll/interleukin-1 receptor) is a protein domain found in plant and animal immune systems. tir is a way for journalists to have a defense against people who wish to harm the press and hide their harm.
What We Built
tir is an open-source ecosystem of tools and AI resources journalists can use for intelligence, copyrighting, social media management, cost management, content management and distribution, and evidence handling.
The platform goes further every day through seeing a need and using state-of-the-art edge cloud infrastructure to find information, refine it, and loop improvement through automated experiments drafted by people and supervised by people.
Intelligence layer — opentir with openingest provides open-source OSINT and data gathering capabilities that were previously available only to well-funded organizations.
Publishing layer — newsroots and Ghostpack give citizen journalists the same publishing infrastructure that corporate newsrooms use.
Inference layer — tir-infer provides free AI inference for newsrooms. Summarization, translation, entity extraction, and more—without sending your data to corporate APIs.
Feeds layer — Our public RSSHub instance at rsstown.com keeps the open feed ecosystem alive.
Who This Is For
- Journalists investigating power
- Researchers studying systems and communities
- Newsrooms that need modern infrastructure without corporate dependencies
- Civic organizations that need intelligence tools
- Anyone who believes information infrastructure should be public
The Model
tir labs operates as a non-profit. Our tools are free for consumers, journalists, newsrooms, and researchers under fair use. We never build for for-profit corporations.
We fund operations through grants, donations, and consulting for mission-aligned organizations.