Want to know when your favorite government agency posts new information? Wondering if a corporate press release might see some post-publication revisions? We’ve brought the power of The Marshall Project’s Klaxon site monitoring tool into DocumentCloud, and it’s now easier than ever to track changes and get alerts from websites you care about.

Want to know when your favorite government agency posts new information? Wondering if a corporate press release might see some post-publication revisions? We’ve brought the power of The Marshall Project’s Klaxon site monitoring tool into DocumentCloud, and it’s now easier than ever to track changes and get alerts from websites you care about.

The Marshall Project originally launched the open-source reporting tool Klaxon in 2016 as a way to assist with beat reporting and breaking news. With Klaxon, anyone could quickly mark a web page or just part of a page for monitoring. Klaxon then regularly “pings” that webpage and grabs a copy. If there’s any changes in the two versions, it will send an alert to the user, indicating what changed.

This can be useful in a broad range of scenarios, such as monitoring a court’s website for newly posted orders — in The Marshall Project’s case, potentially a stay of execution or a denial of an appeal. It can also be used to get alerts when new data sets or documents are posted, or, as in the example below, updates when the White House issues new statements.

At MuckRock, we’ve been using Klaxon to monitor for new contact information to add to our agency database as well as newly posted FOIA logs.

Klaxon has always been free and open source, but required each newsroom to set up, configure and maintain its own server, creating one more thing to manage. To help broaden who can take advantage of this powerful tool, we worked with The Marshall Project to bring a version of Klaxon into DocumentCloud (read more from them here).

The result is Klaxon Cloud, which anyone can start using immediately with their existing MuckRock or DocumentCloud account (no verification required). Our goal was to make it easy as possible to get started:

*Go to the Klaxon Cloud Add-On (via that link or by searching for “Klaxon” under Add-Ons).

  • Drag the bookmark link into your bookmark menu.

  • Visit the webpage you want to monitor, click the bookmark and then follow the prompts.

You’ll then get email notifications whenever there is an update to the page, as well as a link to the new snapshot, an option to download a copy of changes, and the ability to visualize the changes in the Wayback Machine.