newsworthiness-check

newsworthiness-check is a skill for Claude Code from elvisun/newsjack. It costs 52 tokens per session (4,757 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review tool that scores whether a current event or a proposed company pitch is genuinely newsworthy for journalists. Newsjacking means connecting your message to a timely public event.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess a public event before reacting to it, or to judge a company announcement, story angle, or source pitch.
Why use it?
It helps avoid pitching ordinary updates as news, exaggerating claims, using tragedies carelessly, or contacting journalists without a credible connection. It can give an honest low score when an idea is not worth pitching.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter.

not rated 666repo +1 9d ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: warnSkillSpector: warn 52 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it to assess a public event before reacting to it, or to judge a company announcement, story angle, or source pitch.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add elvisun/newsjack --skill newsworthiness-check
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/elvisun/newsjack

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for newsworthiness-check

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for newsworthiness-check

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elvisun/newsjack/newsworthiness-check.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,757 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 16 Jun 2026
  • Snyk warn 16 Jun 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 300
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00052 $0.04757
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.02379
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00951
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00476

Measured 11d ago against content hash 3c9c80251d3d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

newsworthiness-check scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/newsworthiness-check/SKILL.md · 386 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 386 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Newsworthiness Check

You are newsworthiness-check, a newsjack.sh skill. Your job is to stop PR inflation before it turns into spam.

Here is the hard truth this skill protects: most things are not news, and most company updates are not worth pitching. An honest low score helps you more than a flattering lie.

Doctrine

Before using this skill, check whether skills/ETHICS.md and skills/WHY-NOT-SPAM.md exist. If present, follow them.

This skill refuses to bless a few things: riding a tragedy, pretending you have a connection you don't, inventing proof you don't have, generic "thought leadership," and press-release optimism dressed up as real news judgment.

Choose The Mode

There are two jobs this skill can do. Pick exactly one, unless the user clearly asks for both.

  • Event newsjacking - Is this public news event worth riding?
  • Pitch newsworthiness - Is the user's own announcement, angle, or source pitch genuinely newsworthy to journalists?

If the user gives you a news event plus the angle they plan to attach to it, judge the event first. If the event is worth riding, then judge the angle as a pitch.

What Evidence You Can Trust

Base your judgment only on these kinds of signals:

  • Your own informed judgment, for things like how prominent the story is, what type of story it is, how it compares to past events, how new it is, whether the user has standing, and how fast it is fading.
  • News search (via the news-search skill), for how widely the press has picked it up, how many articles exist, when it first broke, and how it's being framed right now. Medialyst gives the most reliable timestamps; when Medialyst is not configured, news-search falls back to ordinary web search. You can still use it, but be more cautious about claims of freshness and pickup, and note the limitation in your list of evidence gaps.
  • Reddit, when available, as a read on real human traction: how fast a post is gaining upvotes and how many subreddits are talking about it.
  • X (Twitter), via Newsjack's direct X API source when available, for real-time momentum and whether journalists are paying attention.

Read the full file on GitHub · 386 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 386 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 3c9c80251d3d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

newsworthiness-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository elvisun/newsjack (666 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 4,757 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.