Journalism agent skills

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:

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:

Skills (manual installation)

Most skills live inside a plugin's skills/ directory. The okf-wiki/SKILL.md, pdf-design/SKILL.md, and visual-explainer/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/

# 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/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:

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 fifteen 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

PDF Playground skill

This skill ships inside the pdf-playground plugin.

Superjawn skills

These fourteen skills ship inside the superjawn plugin.

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 thirteen 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.

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>/.

Hooks

Hooks are automated checks that run at specific points in your workflow. Most are non-blocking warnings, but three block intentionally until you resolve them: one-way-door-check, enforce-test-first, and no-ai-attribution.

Writing quality hooks

Verification hooks

Editorial workflow hooks

Preservation hooks

Development hooks

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 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, 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

• Anthropic official skills
• Claude Code documentation
• Codex skills documentation
• Agent Skills specification
• 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)