claude-skills-journalism

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
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
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 give you slash commands you can run directly inside Claude Code. 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	Thirteen development-focused skills for journalists, researchers, and small newsroom dev teams: accessibility, context management, directed multi-agent execution, Electron, mobile debugging, Python pipelines, test-first bug fixing, ethical scraping, no-build frontends, web UI craft, and CLAUDE.md maintenance	/dev-toolkit:director; other skills model-selected	Aug 21, 2026
journalism-core	Fifteen 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, 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	Aug 21, 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	n/a, skill only	Sep 14, 2026
pdf-design	PDF report and proposal design system with brand variables, budget tables, and reusable content blocks (stats strips, three-column, four-tile pillars, partner grids)	n/a, skill-only	Sep 15, 2026
pdf-playground	Create branded proposals, reports, one-pagers, newsletters, slides, and event materials with an interactive control panel for live design editing (colors, fonts, spacing, sections) and a guided wizard for proposals	/pdf-playground:proposal, /pdf-playground:report, /pdf-playground:onepager, /pdf-playground:newsletter, /pdf-playground:slides, /pdf-playground:event, /pdf-playground:preview	Sep 4, 2026
project-templates-toolkit	Three skills for setting up and closing out journalism projects: a CLAUDE.md project-memory writer (institutional knowledge), a LESSONS.md retrospective writer (failures and decisions), and a template-selector decision tree across 6 project types	n/a, skills only	Aug 24, 2026
research-toolkit	Six skills for research, source preservation, and academic workflows: academic writing, legal paywall-bypass via Unpaywall and library databases, web archiving (Wayback / Archive.today / ArchiveBox), web page change monitoring, AI-enriched digital archive construction, and a curated free-API catalog with sunset currency notes (IEX Cloud, CrowdTangle, ProPublica Congress, X, Reddit)	n/a, skills only	Aug 21, 2026
security-toolkit	Four defensive security skills covering OWASP Top 10 fundamentals and supply-chain hardening: pre-deployment audit checklists (auth, input validation, secrets management), secure authentication patterns (password hashing, session management, JWT, OAuth, passkeys), API hardening (rate limiting, CORS, request throttling, defense-in-depth for Express, FastAPI, and serverless), and npm/bun supply-chain hardening with install-time cooldown plus a sandboxed pre-install scan for the bypass case (defends against Mini Shai-Hulud-class worms)	/security-toolkit:hotpatch	Sep 7, 2026
superjawn	Research-augmented fork of obra/superpowers. Default-on research phase fires before brainstorming, systematic-debugging, and writing-skills. Includes all 14 skills with no soft dependencies on the upstream superpowers plugin	invoked indirectly via skills (e.g. superjawn:brainstorming, superjawn:systematic-debugging, superjawn:writing-plans)	Aug 21, 2026
video-toolkit	Four composable skills for social-video accountability reporting: downloading public video from Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook; transcribing it with a provenance sidecar and a CPU path any evaluator can re-run; extracting and vision-analyzing frames; and aggregating the result into an interactive dashboard	n/a, skills only	Aug 21, 2026
web-design-picker	Build two to five distinct website directions, a switchable client review site, downloadable design assets, preview images, static QA reports, and separate Cloudflare Drop and design-handoff packages	n/a, skill only	Sep 2, 2026
visual-explainer	HTML diagrams, data tables, architecture views, slide decks, and KPI dashboards adapted from nicobailon/visual-explainer with journalism, newsroom, and academic design sensibilities	/visual-explainer:project-recap	Aug 21, 2026

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 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 15 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 15 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: