jamditis/claude‑skills‑journalism

What it is

Claude Skills Journalism is a library of agent‑skills – reusable instruction packages that can be loaded by Anthropic’s Claude Code (and, to a lesser extent, OpenAI Codex). The skills encode journalism‑specific knowledge, workflows, templates and helper scripts so that an AI coding‑assistant can act like a newsroom‑toolkit.

Component	What it provides
Plugins (e.g., autocontext, dev‑toolkit, journalism‑core, pdf‑playground)	Slash‑commands inside Claude Code that trigger a skill or a group of skills (e.g. /pdf‑playground:proposal).
Skill packages	Individual SKILL.md directories containing the actual prompts, templates, and any supporting files (e.g., source‑verification, fact‑check‑workflow, academic‑writing).
Catalog	skills-catalog.yaml lists every skill, its package, lifecycle and how it should be invoked.
Docs site	https://skills.amditis.tech – searchable browser, setup guides and version‑age indicators.

Who might use it

• Journalists, editors and newsroom dev teams that want Claude Code to help write, fact‑check, file FOIA requests, manage editorial calendars, design PDFs, etc.
• Researchers/academics who need AI‑assisted literature reviews, web‑archiving or free‑API catalogs.
• Small‑team product or design groups that can reuse the design‑oriented skills (PDF design, web‑design picker, visual‑explainer).

How to get started

1. Install Claude Code (or Codex if you prefer the OpenAI CLI). Verify with claude --version.
2. Add the marketplace plugin inside a Claude session:

   /plugin marketplace add jamditis/claude-skills-journalism
   /plugin install pdf-playground@claude-skills-journalism
   

3. Restart Claude Code. The installed plugins expose slash‑commands listed in the README (e.g., /autocontext:evolve, /pdf‑playground:report).
4. For a single skill without the whole plugin, copy or symlink the skill’s folder into ~/.claude/skills/<skill‑name>/SKILL.md as shown in the manual‑install section.
5. (Optional) Use the skills CLI (npx skills@latest add …) to make the same skills available to Codex.

What the skills actually do

Skill group	Example capabilities
journalism‑core	AP‑style enforcement, AI‑writing detox, source‑verification (SIFT, deep‑fake detection), FOIA/LAI request templates, crisis‑communication checklists, newsletter bulk‑sender compliance.
research‑toolkit	Automated literature‑search via Unpaywall, web‑archiving to Wayback/ArchiveBox, change‑monitoring with webhooks, curated free‑API catalog with sunset warnings.
dev‑toolkit	Accessibility checks, multi‑agent orchestration, Python pipeline scaffolding, ethical web‑scraping helpers, no‑build front‑end generators.
pdf‑playground / pdf‑design	Interactive UI for branding, layout blocks, and one‑click generation of proposals, reports, slides, newsletters.
visual‑explainer	Turn data into styled HTML diagrams, KPI dashboards, and slide decks with dark/light themes.
video‑toolkit	Download social‑media video, transcribe with provenance side‑cars, run frame‑level vision analysis, produce an interactive dashboard.

Each skill is version‑tracked; the README notes the last update date so users can verify that legal‑or‑API references are still current.

Limitations / scope

• The repository does not contain a standalone AI model; it only supplies prompt‑based instruction sets for Claude Code / Codex.
• Some plugins (e.g., superjawn) are forks of external projects and rely on Claude’s runtime to execute; they won’t run as a normal CLI tool.
• Codex support is experimental – the README warns about duplicate‑install paths and limited runtime testing.

TL;DR

jamditis/claude-skills-journalism is a curated collection of prompt‑driven “skills” that turn Anthropic’s Claude Code (and, partially, OpenAI Codex) into a specialized newsroom assistant, covering writing, verification, research, design and security workflows. Install via Claude’s plugin marketplace, then invoke the provided slash‑commands or copy individual SKILL.md folders for fine‑grained use.