Monitor current news and reaction signals, then decide which are credible newsjacking opportunities for a client. Uses the local monitoring engine for evidence, but the skill owns PR judgment, brand safety, standing, decay, angle fit, and handoff.

Newsjack Detector Find timely public signals and decide whether a client has a credible, non spammy reason to use them. The monitoring engine collects evidence and computes mechanical signals; you make the PR judgment. This is a molecule skill — it orchestrates atomic skills rather than re implementing them. Coarse relevance goes to relevance coarse filter , story identity to story origin check , angle fit to angle generator , ad hoc news lookups to news search , and handoff to reactive comment / journalist fit check / meanest editor . Do not duplicate an atom's logic or prompt here; a worker running a pass loads that atom's SKILL.md directly, so the atom stays the single source of truth. The monitoring engine's live news search source needs a Medialyst key; without one it runs on RSS/X plus host driven news search and degrades gracefully. Treat a missing Medialyst key as reduced coverage, not a failure — never stall the run or lead with a missing key complaint. Runtime Mode Newsjack Detector has two runtime modes: Full Mode: Use this in Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, or another capable agent harness with shell, filesystem, network, and local CLI access. Full Mode runs the canonical newsjack detector pipeline, writes JSON artifacts, applies deterministic freshness gates, and can use multi agent/cost optimized worker passes. Limited Mode: Use this in Claude.ai chat, ChatGPT chat, Claude Cowork, or any restricted runtime without shell/filesystem/CLI access. Do not attempt curl , npm , or on demand CLI installation. Run the Limited Mode Scan below and label the output as reduced coverage. Before you decide you're in Limited Mode, check whether newsjack is installed. It ships as a prebuilt, bundled binary — you do not need Go, a compiler, or any build/install step to run it. Never look for a Go toolchain, and never declare the CLI "missing" or tell the user they need a "Go environment" without running this check first: 1. Run newsjack version . If it prints a version, you're in Full Mode — use plain newsjack ... for every command. 2. If newsjack isn't on PATH , try the bundled location ~/.newsjack/bin/newsjack version . If that prints a version, use that full path in place of newsjack everywhere below. 3. Only if both fail (and you genuinely have no shell) are you in Limited Mode. The bundled binary is almost always already installed — assume Full Mode and verify, don't assume it's missing. Required Workflow (follow in order) Default mode in Full Mode: run the canonical pipeline and return a report. This skill exists to produce a freshness gated newsjack report, including for scheduled/cron runs. Execute by default — only drop into discussion/planning when Step 2 is blocked. In Limited Mode, run a disclosed reduced coverage scan instead. 1. CHECK DOCTRINE. If skills/ETHICS.md or skills/WHY NOT SPAM.md exist, follow them. This skill refuses tragedy hooks, fabricated standing, fake urgency, and spray and pray output. These blocks are absolute and override every later step. 2. ANCHOR THE CLIENT — ASK FIRST ONLY IF BLOCKED. Identify company, topics, competitors, spokespeople, standing, and client specific exclusions, from a profile JSON or plain text context. No profile and no usable client context → ask for it before running. Never invent profile facts. Genuinely ambiguous (which client? which topic? one off vs recurring?) → ask one clarifying question, then proceed. Otherwise do not stall the run. Missing standing is not a blocker: monitor, but mark opportunities weak / no standing . Load the client brief. Read the monitor's brief.md (its path is surfaced as brief path by monitor run / monitor status , or it sits next to the profile). It is the source of truth for what this client will and won't pitch and how to present the scan — see Client Brief below. An empty/template brief carries no rules. 3. PICK THE RUN SHAPE. Restricted chat / no CLI / no filesystem → Limited Mode Scan below. One off / "what's moving on X" → Quick Run below. Real judgment, agent run, or scheduled job → Canonical Pipeline below (the default for any output a human or pitch will rely on). Recurring / cron feed monitoring → Canonical Pipeline plus the recurring rules in Freshness Gate ( feed only new only max age hours 24 , hard freshness gate). 4. RUN THE PIPELINE. Execute the chosen path end to end. For anything beyond a Quick Run in Full Mode, never skip the story origin / freshness gate. 5. JUDGE — NEVER TRUST MECHANICS AS PERMISSION. routing.queue priority and story size are recall pressure, not pitch permission. You decide newsjacking worthiness, standing, journalist shape, and brand safety (see Engine vs Skill Boundary and the Rubric section below). Gate angle fit through angle generator . 6. VERIFY & CONCLUDE. In Full Mode, run the Completion Checklist , then report: the run.md path, whether coarse passes were cost optimized or fallback, whether every surfaced signal has verified ≤24h first public freshness, and top findings. In Limited Mode, state that no local artifacts, saved monitor state, or deterministic freshness gate were available. Engine vs Skill Boundary The Go CLI owns (mechanical, deterministic): ingestion, dedupe, clustering, novelty tracking mechanical scores only: freshness, source agreement, novelty, profile match, source quality, momentum, major news weight deterministic story size scoring from news search metadata: log scaled estimated monthly traffic + domain authority, with coverage spread across independently surfaced domains. When authority metadata is missing for a recognized major outlet, the engine may use a low confidence known outlet fallback. When publication metadata is otherwise sparse, the engine may attach a low confidence story size.attention hint from deterministic source signals such as X News clusters, major public actors, and high stakes event terms; this is recall pressure, not proof of magnitude. deterministic hygiene filtering for docs/help/product/SEO pages coarse relevance application via newsjack filter apply , plus two recall guards: a big story guard that upgrades any reject of a high / major story size signal to monitor only ( big story recall ) — the cheap pass can never hard drop a big story — and a profile match guard that upgrades reject/no profile bridge to monitor only when detector/profile evidence already matched the client, a competitor, or a profile term deterministic freshness gating via newsjack origin apply operational routing: lane, queue priority, threshold demotion flag deterministic safety flags You own (PR judgment): whether the signal is newsjacking worthy and whether the client has standing same story / original coverage judgment (via story origin check ) final decay explanation from freshness gate journalist shape, brand safety judgment, and handoff to the next skill Never treat routing.queue priority as permission to pitch — it is only operational queue order. Client Brief Each monitor may carry a brief.md — a prose, user owned statement of what this client will and won't pitch and how they want the scan presented. It is the source of truth for client pitch/output policy; the profile JSON governs collection , the brief governs what gets pitched and shown . The CLI only creates and surfaces the file ( monitor init scaffolds it; brief path is reported by monitor run / monitor status ); it never parses it — reading and applying it is yours. Where it binds: triage and report rendering — never collection. Keep retrieval and the coarse pass brief agnostic so nothing is dropped before judgment; the brief only decides what an already collected, already fresh item is allowed to be and how it's shown . Never pitch rules are hard: an item matching one can never be pitch ready . A non big item drops to watch ( client policy exclusion ); a fresh high / major item stays big story with off policy: true (the never drop doctrine still holds — surface it, don't hide it). newsjack triage enforces this. Audience / We pitch set the standing altitude : topical overlap is not pitchability. A story can be on topic and still off brief. How to surface is presentation only: collapse a section to a disclosed count, never silence it. Disclose what the brief held back (count + reason) so nothing is hidden. Feedback updates the brief. When the user reacts to a run — "too policy heavy," "stop showing me X," "this is exactly right" — propose an edit to brief.md (a new We never pitch rule, a How to surface line, or a dated Example ) so the policy is captured durably, not just for this run. Confirm the edit. An empty/template brief means run with defaults. Profile Setup File The monitor profile JSON is the source of truth for collection setup: a focused set of short broad beat topics, search terms, competitors, feeds, standing, spokespeople, and exclusions. Prefer 6 8 core 2 3 word topics, with one word topics allowed when natural. If the user wants to change what the monitor looks for, edit the profile JSON rather than generating one off retrieval terms during a detector run. Installed monitors keep the setup file at ~/.newsjack/monitors/<slug /profile.json ; brief.md sits next to it. Direct detector runs use the file passed with profile . Fixture profiles live under fixtures/newsjack detector agent/profile.<slug .json . Use newsjack monitor setup when the user wants to create or materially revise a profile. Collection feedback such as "watch broader accounting firm news" belongs in profile.json ( topics / search terms / feed urls ): put 6 8 core broad beats in topics , and put broad retrieval terms plus named platforms/products/regulators/competitors in search terms . Pitch policy feedback such as "don't pitch policy stories" belongs in brief.md . After editing profile.json , rerun a mock or fixture smoke before trusting the next live run. Limited Mode Scan Use this path when running in Claude.ai chat, ChatGPT chat, Claude Cowork, or any runtime without shell/filesystem/CLI access. Limited Mode is useful for PR judgment, not canonical monitoring. It does not create saved monitors, write JSON artifacts, keep seen state, run source ingestion, apply the Go freshness gate, or use cost optimized worker passes. 1. Anchor the client. Use a pasted profile, user context, website summary, or plain text description. If there is no usable client context, ask for it. 2. Collect a small evidence set. Use pasted links first. If the runtime has web/search tools, search recent news for the profile topics, competitors, named regulators/platforms, and any explicit user topic. Keep the query list short and disclose it. 3. Build candidates manually. For each candidate, keep title, source, URL, apparent publication time, why it matched the client, and any safety concerns. Do not invent publication dates, outlet names, source counts, or traffic/authority scores. 4. Verify freshness where possible. Prefer primary/source of record pages and independent coverage. Treat unverified dates as freshness unverified ; do not pitch them as time sensitive. 5. Apply PR judgment. Use this skill's doctrine, story origin check reasoning where possible, newsjack triage for standing/routing, and angle generator for any pitchable item. 6. Return an inline report. Use the same sections as Full Mode: Pitch Ready , Big Stories Worth a Look , Watch / Context , plus a short Limited Mode Caveat that names missing capabilities and searches/evidence used. Never call this a canonical detector run. If the user wants saved monitors, scheduled scans, deterministic freshness gates, local artifacts, or recurring seen state, recommend Full Mode in Claude Code, Codex, Op

newsjack-detector