OsiPress (osipress.com)

Snapshots of what foreign press are telling their own people, translated to English and shown side by side. Prototype pair: Iran and Israel.

Problem

When you read about a foreign conflict, the reporting usually comes from outlets in your own country. If you’ve followed the Iran–Israel war, you’ve probably read dozens of articles about Iran and very few from Iran.

Iranian and Israeli outlets publish for domestic audiences in Persian and Hebrew, often framing events differently from their international editions. Unless you read those languages, directly comparing that coverage is difficult.

What is OsiPress?

OsiPress (Open Source Info Press) shows what different countries' presses are telling their own citizens. Right now it covers Iran and Israel through six outlets:

• Iran (Persian editions): Kayhan (right), Hamshahri (center), Shargh (left)
• Israel (Hebrew editions): Israel Hayom (right-leaning), Yedioth Ahronoth (centrist), Haaretz (left-leaning)

Twice a day, OsiPress checks each outlet’s most recent articles. Each article includes:

• a verbatim English translation of the headline
• a two-sentence summary
• quotes from the article in the original language to back up the summary
• a link to the original article

Articles live on permanent dated URLs, so over time the site becomes a day-by-day archive of what each side was told.

Here are article comparisons from June 20, 2026, the day Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz (the channel a fifth of the world's oil ships through) closed again:

Tasnim, carrying the IRGC announcement (Persian): "In response to the ceaseless violations of the ceasefire by the Zionist regime in southern Lebanon... the Strait of Hormuz will be closed to vessel traffic."

Israel Hayom (Hebrew): "IDF encircles dozens of Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon, Iran threatens to block the Strait of Hormuz."

In the Iranian telling, Israel broke a ceasefire, so the strait is now closed. In the Israeli telling, the army is rounding up terrorists, and the closure is just a threat. Neither headline is technically lying. They start the story at different points, and each skips the part that complicates its own side. OsiPress won't tell you which telling is right. It puts them next to each other, so you can notice the difference on your own.

Iranian statement · Israel Hayom, June 20, 2026

Architecture / Application Design

The architecture is split into two parts: the script that collects articles and the Flask app that displays them.

The script runs twice a day. It:

1. reads each source's RSS feed
2. uses a light weight OpenAI model to filter for political relevancy
3. extracts the text from each article with Trafilatura
4. translates the headline into English
5. creates a short summary with supporting quotes
6. saves everything to PostgreSQL

Each article is processed separately, so one broken feed or article should not stop the other sources from being collected. Article URLs and redirects are also checked before they are downloaded.

The Flask application reads the latest collection for each source from the database. /today displays the most recent articles, while /archive lets the user view a previous date. If today's collection is empty, the website can fall back up to three days instead of showing a blank page.

In production, the Flask application runs through Gunicorn behind Nginx. A systemd timer runs the ingestion script at 06:00 and 18:00 UTC.

RSS feeds -> ingestion script -> PostgreSQL -> Flask -> Gunicorn -> Nginx

Replicate

You will need Python 3.11+, PostgreSQL, and an OpenAI API key.

First, clone the repository and install the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/ShlokShar/OsiPress.git
cd OsiPress

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a PostgreSQL user and database:

CREATE USER osipress WITH PASSWORD 'your_password';
CREATE DATABASE osipress OWNER osipress;

Create a .env file in the root of the project and fill in these fields:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://osipress:your_password@localhost:5432/osipress
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key

Create the database tables:

python -c "from shared.database import Base, engine; import shared.models; Base.metadata.create_all(engine)"

Then add the countries and sources expected by cron/sources.json. Feel free to change the sources to desired RSS feeds:

INSERT INTO countries (name) VALUES ('Iran'), ('Israel');

INSERT INTO sources (country_id, name, link, political_leaning)
SELECT id, 'Shargh', 'https://www.sharghdaily.com/feeds/', 'Left'
FROM countries WHERE name = 'Iran';

INSERT INTO sources (country_id, name, link, political_leaning)
SELECT id, 'Hamshahri', 'https://www.hamshahrionline.ir/rss/pl/402', 'Center'
FROM countries WHERE name = 'Iran';

INSERT INTO sources (country_id, name, link, political_leaning)
SELECT id, 'Kayhan', 'https://kayhan.ir/fa/rss/allnews', 'Right'
FROM countries WHERE name = 'Iran';

INSERT INTO sources (country_id, name, link, political_leaning)
SELECT id, 'Haaretz', 'https://www.haaretz.co.il/srv/htz---all-articles', 'Left'
FROM countries WHERE name = 'Israel';

INSERT INTO sources (country_id, name, link, political_leaning)
SELECT id, 'Yedioth Ahronoth',
       'https://www.ynet.co.il/Integration/StoryRss2.xml', 'Center'
FROM countries WHERE name = 'Israel';

INSERT INTO sources (country_id, name, link, political_leaning)
SELECT id, 'Israel Hayom', 'https://www.israelhayom.co.il/rss/rss.xml', 'Right'
FROM countries WHERE name = 'Israel';

Run the ingestion script once to collect articles:

python -m cron.script

Finally, start the website:

flask --app main run

The landing page will be available at http://127.0.0.1:5000, with the latest collection at /today and previous collections at /archive.