pdf-playground

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: jamditis.github.io/claude-skills-journalism — interactive skill browser, setup guides, and full documentation.

Guides

Setup and workflow guides, separate from the skills themselves:

Guide	Description
Persistent sessions	Keep Claude Code sessions alive through disconnects using tmux — setup, key bindings, activity notifications, and scheduler coexistence

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 in your terminal:

claude plugin marketplace add https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism
claude 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
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

Skills (manual installation)

Skills load automatically when relevant to your work. To install them, clone this repo into your Claude skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/jamditis/claude-skills-journalism.git ~/.claude/skills/journalism-skills

Or copy individual skills:

cp -r source-verification ~/.claude/skills/

For Claude.ai users

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

Skills overview

Core journalism skills

Skill	Description
source-verification	SIFT method, digital verification, reverse image search, social media account analysis, building verification trails
foia-requests	Public records request drafting, tracking systems, appeals process, state-specific guidance
data-journalism	Data acquisition, cleaning, analysis, visualization, and storytelling for newsrooms
newsroom-style	AP Style enforcement, attribution rules, headline formatting, number conventions
interview-prep	Pre-interview research, question frameworks, recording consent, attribution guidelines
interview-transcription	Recording workflows, transcription, quote management, source databases
story-pitch	Pitch templates for daily news, features, investigations, op-eds, and freelance queries
fact-check-workflow	Claim extraction, evidence gathering, rating scales, correction protocols
editorial-workflow	Story assignment tracking, deadline management, editorial calendars, handoff protocols
crisis-communications	Breaking news protocol, rapid verification, crisis response, misinformation countering
social-media-intelligence	Social monitoring, narrative tracking, account analysis, coordination detection, OSINT

Communications and publishing

Skill	Description
newsletter-publishing	Email newsletter creation, subscriber management, deliverability, A/B testing

Design and production

Skill	Description
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
visual-explainer	Turn complex data into styled HTML pages — architecture diagrams, data tables, flowcharts, timelines, source maps, and dashboards with dark/light theme support

Writing quality