Journalism agent skills
Project: Journalism skills maintenance
A collection of Agent Skills for journalists, researchers, academics, media professionals, and communications practitioners. The same repository serves Claude Code and Codex while keeping Claude-only commands, agents, and hooks clearly labeled.
Docs site: skills.amditis.tech, interactive skill browser, setup guides, and full documentation.
Guides
Setup and workflow guides, separate from the skills themselves:
| Guide | Description |
|---|
| The Codex review setup I run | Code-review setup, everyday workflow, and model-routing notes |
| Autonomous and hands-on dev work | A first-person account of running dev work with Claude in two modes, autonomous sessions that pull tasks off GitHub issues, and hands-on multi-agent reviews at the keyboard, held to one quality bar, with copy-able prompts to adapt the approach to your own agent |
| Multi-agent workflows | Plain-language guide to running many AI agents on one job, fan-out, pipeline, and adversarial-verify patterns, with real examples from ICIJ, The Markup, Full Fact, and Elicit, plus honest cautions |
| Dot skills | An unofficial workshop for ChatGPT dots, OpenAI's always-on agents: Markdown playbooks for status cards, incident updates, visual audits, and source evidence, a small progress-tracker lab, and honest field notes. There is no dot marketplace yet, so these are shared here |
| A month with two ChatGPT dots | A first-person field report on running two dots in newsroom Slack workspaces: repeated approvals, daily computer crashes, a message sent from the wrong account, the Blender work that surprised me, and the skills that kept them usable |
| Persistent sessions | Keep Claude Code sessions alive through disconnects using tmux, setup, key bindings, activity notifications, and scheduler coexistence |
What are agent skills?
Skills are modular instruction sets that an AI coding agent loads when relevant to a task. Each skill contains domain knowledge, workflows, templates, and supporting files. Shared skills in this repository follow the Agent Skills specification; Claude and Codex provide their own installation and runtime layers around that shared content.
Repository control plane
skills-catalog.yaml lists every package and stable
skill. It records each skill's package, path, lifecycle, and invocation mode.
The defaults preserve the existing model-selected invocation behavior.
Each stable skill includes agents/openai.yaml for Codex display metadata.
These files do not change invocation policy. Run npm run validate:catalog to
check catalog coverage, package mappings, skill names, and metadata files.
See INFLUENCES.md and
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for design credit and
license notices.
Installation
Choose the section for your client. During the Codex pilot, use only one Codex installation path for a given skill or package.
Claude Code
Prerequisite: You need Claude Code installed. Run claude --version in your terminal to check.
Plugins (recommended)
Plugins bundle skills and, where provided, commands, agents, or hooks. The table below lists each package’s commands. Run these two commands inside a Claude Code session:
/plugin marketplace add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism
/plugin install pdf-playground@claude-skills-journalism
Then restart Claude Code (close and reopen). See the PDF Playground README for detailed setup instructions and troubleshooting.
Available plugins:
| Plugin | Description | Commands | Updated |
|---|
| autocontext | Cross-session knowledge persistence with skill evolution. Lessons accumulate per-skill, and /autocontext:evolve folds them back into skill files | /autocontext:setup, /autocontext:init, /autocontext:review, /autocontext:status, /autocontext:evolve | Aug 21, 2026 |
| dev-toolkit | Fourteen development-focused skills for journalists, researchers, and small newsroom dev teams: accessibility, context management, minimal-code implementation, UI completeness, directed multi-agent execution, Electron, mobile debugging, Python pipelines, ethical scraping, no-build frontends, web UI craft, and project instruction maintenance | /dev-toolkit:director; other skills model-selected | Oct 28, 2026 |
| journalism-core | Sixteen core journalism skills, including AP-style writing, AI-slop detoxing, source verification (deepfakes/C2PA), FOIA + NJ OPRA requests, Brazilian LAI requests, fact-checking, interview prep, transcription + meeting actions, story pitches, editorial workflow, crisis communications, newsletter publishing with current Gmail / Yahoo / Outlook bulk-sender requirements, and embedded photo metadata for wire distribution | n/a, skills only | Oct 23, 2026 |
| newsroom-agent-ops | Nine skills for safe recurring newsroom work: unattended runs, briefings, intake, delivery, coordination, reconciliation, chat triage, deadline tracking, and issue progression | n/a, skills only | Oct 23, 2026 |
| okf-wiki | Scaffold an Open Knowledge Format (OKF) knowledge base: one-concept-per-file markdown with YAML frontmatter, directory navigation, and a validator. Generates a starter wiki that passes its own conformance and secret-leak checks, ships session-start hooks that orient Claude on the knowledge base before it works, and includes an optional GitHub-wiki bootstrap. For newsroom institutional memory, research atlases, decision logs, and infrastructure maps |
Skills (manual installation)
Most skills live inside a plugin's skills/ directory. The okf-wiki/SKILL.md, pdf-design/SKILL.md, visual-explainer/SKILL.md, and web-design-picker/SKILL.md root-skill packages keep the skill at the package root. To install one skill without taking a whole plugin, clone the repo and copy or symlink the directory that directly contains its SKILL.md. Claude Code discovers skills at ~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, one level deep:
git clone https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism.git ~/projects/claude-skills-journalism
cd ~/projects/claude-skills-journalism
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
# Pull a single skill out of a plugin's skills/ directory:
cp -r journalism-core/skills/source-verification ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r research-toolkit/skills/free-apis-catalog ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r research-toolkit/skills/web-archiving ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r dev-toolkit/skills/web-scraping ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r dev-toolkit/skills/director ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r newsroom-agent-ops/skills/unattended-agent-runs ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r security-toolkit/skills/secure-auth ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r project-templates-toolkit/skills/project-memory ~/.claude/skills/
# A root-skill package is already the directory to copy:
cp -r okf-wiki ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r web-design-picker ~/.claude/skills/
# Or symlink so git pull updates them in place (ln -sfn replaces an existing link):
ln -sfn "$PWD/research-toolkit/skills/free-apis-catalog" ~/.claude/skills/free-apis-catalog
ln -sfn "$PWD/dev-toolkit/skills/director" ~/.claude/skills/director
ln -sfn "$PWD/web-design-picker" ~/.claude/skills/web-design-picker
ln -sfn "$PWD/visual-explainer" ~/.claude/skills/visual-explainer
The standalone copy or link invokes the skill as /director. The installed
plugin invokes it as /dev-toolkit:director because Claude Code namespaces
plugin skills.
Do not clone the repo directly into ~/.claude/skills/journalism-skills/, that nests each SKILL.md too deep and Claude Code won't find them.
Codex
Prerequisite: Install Codex CLI. Run codex --version in your terminal to check. The legacy-compatible package route below is verified with Codex CLI 0.147.0.
Codex can install journalism-core through this repository's Claude marketplace metadata:
codex plugin marketplace add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism
codex plugin add journalism-core@claude-skills-journalism
This legacy-compatible package route exposes the 16 nested journalism-core skills. It does not convert Claude commands, agents, hooks, or root-level skills into Codex components. This repository ships Codex UI metadata but no native Codex plugin manifests.
You can instead install standards-based skills with the skills CLI. This user-level command makes the 16 core skills available across your Codex projects:
npx skills@latest add https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism/tree/master/journalism-core \
--skill '*' --agent codex --copy -g -y
That command installs journalism-core in Codex's documented user skill directory, ~/.agents/skills. The clean-install canary checks that exact global destination. Remove -g to install into the current project's .agents/skills directory and record the source and content hashes in that project's skills-lock.json. To install one skill instead:
npx skills@latest add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism \
--skill fact-check-workflow --agent codex --copy -g -y
Codex desktop can import skills from another agent. Import leaves the source installation in place. Until duplicate-identity and uninstall behavior has been tested for this repository, do not import a skill and also install the same skill through npx skills or the package route.
Codex's bundled skill installer writes to a different Codex-specific directory and is not a tested installation path for this repository. Codex does not deduplicate same-name skills across install roots, so don't combine it with the .agents/skills route above.
Use only one Codex installation path for the same skill identity.
See the checked-in Codex compatibility matrix for tested versions, package boundaries, and pending runtime gates. A valid install is not a package-wide runtime support claim. The historical pilots remain tied to their recorded snapshots.
Claude.ai
Skills can be added via the Claude.ai interface under Settings > Skills.
Skills overview
The Updated column in every table below is the date that skill or plugin last
changed, taken from git history rather than typed by hand. Use it to judge
whether your installed copy has drifted: a skill that cites statutes, platform
APIs, or vendor behavior is worth re-checking against its sources once it is
several months old. The same dates appear as tape on each card at
skills.amditis.tech, where the tape yellows with
age.
Core journalism skills (in journalism-core plugin)
These sixteen skills ship together as the journalism-core plugin. Install via /plugin install journalism-core@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| ai-writing-detox | Eliminate AI-generated patterns that erode reader trust. Banned words, phrases, and structures with alternatives | Oct 23, 2026 |
| brazil-records-requests | Public records requests under Brazil's Access to Information Law (Lei 12.527/2011), portal selection across federal, state, municipal, judicial and legislative bodies; deadlines; the four-level appeal chain (first instance, agency head, CGU, CMRI); templates in Portuguese with English glosses | Aug 21, 2026 |
| crisis-communications | Breaking news protocol, rapid verification, crisis response, misinformation countering | Aug 21, 2026 |
| data-journalism | Dataset analysis, chart and map creation, statistical reasoning, data-driven story structure | Aug 21, 2026 |
| editorial-workflow | Story assignment tracking, deadline management, editorial calendars, handoff protocols | Aug 21, 2026 |
| fact-check-workflow | Claim extraction, evidence gathering, rating scales, correction protocols | Aug 21, 2026 |
| foia-requests | Public records request drafting (federal FOIA + NJ OPRA), tracking, appeals, current statutory citations |
Newsroom agent operations skills
These nine skills ship together as the newsroom-agent-ops plugin.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| unattended-agent-runs | Run recurring work with leases, checkpoints, recovery, delivery checks, and resource limits | Oct 23, 2026 |
| scheduled-briefing | Build concise, source-backed, phone-readable newsroom briefings | Oct 23, 2026 |
| deadline-and-reply-tracking | Track due dates, acknowledgments, replies, waiting states, and next-owner actions | Oct 23, 2026 |
| email-request-intake | Process allowlisted email requests while treating messages and attachments as untrusted data | Oct 23, 2026 |
| document-delivery | Inspect, share, send, and verify editable documents and PDFs | Oct 23, 2026 |
| chat-mention-triage | Classify team-chat mentions without duplicating the designated live responder | Oct 23, 2026 |
| record-reconciliation | Reconcile task, contact, and interaction records with privacy controls and readback | Oct 23, 2026 |
| multi-agent-coordinator |
Research and academic skills (in research-toolkit plugin)
These six skills ship together as the research-toolkit plugin. Install via /plugin install research-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| academic-writing | Research design, literature reviews, IMRaD structure, peer review responses, grant proposals | Oct 23, 2026 |
| content-access | Unpaywall, CORE, Semantic Scholar APIs, library databases, ethical access patterns | Aug 21, 2026 |
| digital-archive | Building archives with AI enrichment, entity extraction, knowledge graphs | Oct 23, 2026 |
| free-apis-catalog | Curated free-API catalog organized by journalism use-case, with currency notes for major API sunsets (IEX Cloud, CrowdTangle, ProPublica Congress, X, Reddit) and an evaluation rubric | Aug 21, 2026 |
| page-monitoring | Change detection, RSS generation, webhook alerts, automatic archiving on changes | Aug 21, 2026 |
| web-archiving | Wayback Machine, Archive.today, legal evidence preservation, multi-archive redundancy | Aug 21, 2026 |
Design and production
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| pdf-design | Professional PDF reports and proposals with brand system, budget tables, and multi-page layouts. For the full interactive experience, use pdf-playground instead | Oct 23, 2026 |
| web-design-picker | Produce distinct responsive website directions, a client review picker, downloadable design assets, preview images, static QA reports, and deployment and handoff packages | Oct 23, 2026 |
| visual-explainer | Turn complex data into styled HTML pages, architecture diagrams, data tables, flowcharts, timelines, source maps, and dashboards with dark/light theme support. Now registered as a plugin (/plugin install visual-explainer@claude-skills-journalism) | Oct 23, 2026 |
PDF Playground skill
This skill ships inside the pdf-playground plugin.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| document-design | Create print-ready HTML proposals, reports, one-pagers, newsletters, slides, flyers, and other PDF-ready documents with reusable brand and layout patterns | Oct 23, 2026 |
Superjawn skills
These thirteen skills ship inside the superjawn plugin.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| brainstorming | Explore intent, requirements, design, and relevant research before creative implementation work | Oct 23, 2026 |
| dispatching-parallel-agents | Divide independent tasks among parallel agents without shared-state conflicts | Oct 23, 2026 |
| executing-plans | Execute a written implementation plan with freshness and review checkpoints | Oct 23, 2026 |
| finishing-a-development-branch | Verify completed work and choose a safe integration, pull request, or cleanup path | Oct 23, 2026 |
| receiving-code-review | Evaluate review feedback against the code before implementing it | Oct 23, 2026 |
| requesting-code-review | Request focused review before integration or after a major implementation | Oct 23, 2026 |
| subagent-driven-development | Execute independent plan tasks with agents in the current session | Oct 23, 2026 |
| systematic-debugging |
Project documentation skills (in project-templates-toolkit plugin)
These four skills ship together as the project-templates-toolkit plugin. Install via /plugin install project-templates-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| goal-progress-bar | Render weighted progress with current evidence, scope changes, blocked-state checks, and protection against false 100% | Oct 28, 2026 |
| project-memory | Generate project instruction files that capture project-specific knowledge. Includes templates for editorial tools, events, publications, research, pipelines, and archives | Oct 23, 2026 |
| project-retrospective | Generate LESSONS.md files that document what worked and what didn't. Templates for investigations, events, publications, and tools | Aug 21, 2026 |
| template-selector | Decision tree for choosing the right project documentation template | Oct 23, 2026 |
Development skills (in dev-toolkit plugin)
These fourteen skills ship together as the dev-toolkit plugin. Install via /plugin install dev-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once, or copy individual skills from dev-toolkit/skills/<name>/.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| accessibility-compliance | WCAG 2.2 baseline, alt text, focus management, motion preferences, accessible charts | Aug 21, 2026 |
| claude-md-updater | Detect durable session lessons and propose scoped project instruction edits for approval | Oct 23, 2026 |
| context-engineering-fundamentals | Attention budget, lost-in-middle recall, context degradation patterns, and mitigations for long sessions | Aug 21, 2026 |
| director | Explicit top-tier direction through workers configured in the applicable project instruction file | Oct 23, 2026 |
| electron-dev | Electron security model (contextIsolation, sandbox), IPC patterns, packaging | Aug 21, 2026 |
| mobile-debugging | Eruda, vConsole, Chrome DevTools on Android, Safari Web Inspector for iOS, console capture | Oct 4, 2026 |
| one-way-door | Flag irreversible architectural decisions (data models, infra, auth, APIs) before committing | Oct 23, 2026 |
| ponytail-dev |
Security skills (in security-toolkit plugin)
These five skills ship together as the security-toolkit plugin, paired with the /security-toolkit:hotpatch slash command. Install via /plugin install security-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.
| Skill | Description | Updated |
|---|
| api-hardening | Rate limiting, input validation, CORS, security headers, API key management, defense-in-depth for Express, FastAPI, and serverless | Aug 21, 2026 |
| private-secret-scanning | Local Gitleaks scans for staged changes, push ranges, and full history in private repositories, with pre-commit and pre-push hooks, redacted reports, and a fail-closed self-test | Oct 23, 2026 |
| secure-auth | Production-ready authentication patterns: password hashing, session management, JWT, OAuth, passkeys / WebAuthn, MFA | Aug 21, 2026 |
| security-checklist | Pre-deployment security audit covering OWASP Top 10 fundamentals: authentication, input validation, secrets, database security, compliance basics | Oct 23, 2026 |
| supply-chain-hardening | npm/bun install-time cooldown plus sandboxed pre-install scan (bwrap on Linux, sandbox-exec on macOS). Defends against Mini Shai-Hulud-class worms; paired with /security-toolkit:hotpatch for the cooldown-bypass case | Oct 23, 2026 |
Video analysis skills (in video-toolkit plugin)
These four skills ship together as the video-toolkit plugin and compose into one pipeline. Install via /plugin install video-toolkit@claude-skills-journalism, or copy individual skills from video-toolkit/skills/<name>/.
| Skill | What it does | Updated |
|---|
| video-download | Collect public video from Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook via yt-dlp, with a browser-automation fallback for broken extractors | Aug 21, 2026 |
| video-transcribe | Batch Whisper transcription with a provenance sidecar per transcript; the CPU whisper.cpp path is the transcript of record so an auditor can re-run it without a GPU | Aug 21, 2026 |
| video-frames | Extract frames, build 3x3 grid composites, and run vision analysis over on-screen text, setting, and presentation style | Sep 23, 2026 |
| video-dashboard | Aggregate transcripts and frame analysis into topic, tone, and cross-platform views behind a single-page dashboard | Aug 21, 2026 |
Hooks
Hooks are automated checks that run at specific points in your workflow. Most are non-blocking warnings. one-way-door-check and no-ai-attribution block until you resolve them. prose-question-guard blocks a stop once to move a question into AskUserQuestion.
The 17 standalone hooks in hooks/ are optional and installed manually from their reference files. Installing a skill package does not enable these top-level hooks. The prose question guard uses Python 3 on Windows, macOS, and Linux; its public guide includes platform-specific setup and an example from my Claude Code session.
Writing quality hooks
Verification hooks
Editorial workflow hooks
Preservation hooks
| Hook | Event | Description |
|---|
| archive-reminder | PostToolUse | Remind to archive URLs when citing sources |
Interaction hooks
Development hooks
| Hook | Event | Description |
|---|
| one-way-door-check | PreToolUse | Block creation of files representing irreversible architectural decisions |
| bug-report-detector | UserPromptSubmit | Detect bug reports and remind the agent to establish the failure before fixing it |
| pre-commit-review | PreToolUse | Surface the staged diff for line-by-line review before a commit, and flag deletions of safety-critical guardrails |
| no-ai-attribution | PreToolUse | Block AI authorship credit in commits, PR bodies, and comments before they land |
Skill structure
Each shared skill follows the Agent Skills standard:
skill-name/
├── SKILL.md # Main instructions (required)
├── examples/ # Example inputs/outputs (optional)
├── templates/ # Reusable templates (optional)
└── scripts/ # Helper scripts (optional)
SKILL.md format
---
name: skill-name
description: When to use this skill and what it does
---
# Skill title
Instructions and knowledge for Claude to use.
Usage examples
Source verification
When you ask Claude to verify a claim or check a source:
"Can you help me verify this viral tweet claiming [X]?"
"What steps should I take to verify this document?"
"Help me check if this image is authentic"
Interview preparation
When preparing for interviews:
"Help me prepare questions for interviewing the mayor about the budget"
"What background research should I do before this interview?"
"Create a question framework for an investigative interview"
Story pitching
When developing story ideas:
"Help me pitch this feature story idea"
"Draft a query letter for this freelance investigation"
"What's the angle for this daily news story?"
Fact-checking
When verifying claims:
"Walk me through fact-checking this politician's statement"
"Help me document the evidence for this claim"
"What rating should this fact-check receive?"
Project documentation
When setting up or closing projects:
"Generate project instructions for this investigation project"
"Write a retrospective for the conference website we just finished"
"Which template should I use for this newsletter project?"
Social media intelligence
When investigating online narratives:
"Help me analyze this account for authenticity"
"Track how this claim is spreading across platforms"
"Check for signs of coordinated behavior"
Web archiving and monitoring
When preserving or tracking content:
"Archive this page to multiple services for redundancy"
"Set up monitoring for changes to this government page"
"Find academic papers related to this topic"
Contributing
Contributions welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide, skill structure, testing, and style guidelines.
Quick version: fork, create your skill with a SKILL.md frontmatter file, run npm run validate:agent-skills, test the clients affected by your change, and submit a PR.
Target audiences
- Investigative journalists - source verification, FOIA, data analysis
- Newsroom developers - scraping, data pipelines, visualization tools
- Academic researchers - writing, methodology, peer review
- Graduate students - thesis writing, literature reviews, proposals
- Communications professionals - content strategy, research methods
- Fact-checkers - verification workflows, evidence documentation
- Digital archivists - preservation, metadata, knowledge graphs
- Editors - workflow management, style enforcement, quality control
Related resources
License
MIT License - See LICENSE for details.
Author
Joe Amditis (@jamditis)
