That's fine with me. The two concepts of "open-source" at hand are drastically different. The lack of ability to verify the website's source code doesn't prevent me in any way from seeing its content which helps me verify journalist claims.
I hope the author is able to grow their service through marketing, licensing, and contracts with media agencies. Open-sourcing the service's software would be a distraction from that goal and would create fragmentation of its database when clones of the service are created. What's important for a service like this is open data, not necessarily an open-source stack.