Claude skills for journalism, media, and academia

A curated collection of Claude Code skills designed for journalists, researchers, academics, media professionals, and communications practitioners.

Docs site: skills.amditis.tech — interactive skill browser, setup guides, and full documentation.

Guides

Setup and workflow guides, separate from the skills themselves:

What are Claude skills?

Skills are modular instruction sets that extend Claude's capabilities for specialized tasks. Each skill contains domain-specific knowledge, workflows, templates, and best practices that Claude loads automatically when relevant to your work.

Installation

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:

Skills (manual installation)

Every skill in this repo now lives inside a plugin's skills/ directory. To install just one without taking the whole plugin, clone the repo and copy or symlink the nested skill folder. 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 security-toolkit/skills/secure-auth ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r project-templates-toolkit/skills/project-memory ~/.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

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.

For Claude.ai users

Skills can be added via the Claude.ai interface under Settings > Skills.

Skills overview

Core journalism skills (in journalism-core plugin)

These thirteen skills ship together as the journalism-core plugin. Install via /plugin install journalism-core@claude-skills-journalism to get all of them at once.

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.

Design and production

Project documentation skills (in project-templates-toolkit plugin)

These three 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.

Development skills (in dev-toolkit plugin)

These ten 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>/.

Security skills (in security-toolkit plugin)

These four 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.

Hooks

Hooks are automated checks that run at specific points in your workflow. Most are non-blocking warnings, but two — one-way-door-check and enforce-test-first — block intentionally until you resolve them.

Writing quality hooks

Verification hooks

Editorial workflow hooks

Preservation hooks

Development hooks

Skill structure

Each skill follows the Claude 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 a CLAUDE.md 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, test with Claude Code, 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

• Anthropic official skills
• Claude Code documentation
• Agent Skills Standard
• autopunk-media-skills — broadcast, TV, podcast, and radio production skills; complements this repo's investigative focus. Free library, paired with a paid product (autopunk.io)
• NICAR (Investigative Reporters & Editors)
• First Draft News
• Verification Handbook
• AP Stylebook
• Bellingcat OSINT guides

License

MIT License - See LICENSE for details.

Author

Joe Amditis (@jamditis)

Built with Claude Code