Newsjack.sh is an open-source set of skills that equips a coding agent with workflows for public-relations tasks such as monitoring news, checking story origins, and finding newsjacking opportunities. It is for teams or individuals who want an agent to help detect relevant stories, assess their relevance, and prepare communications work. The catalogue entries are Newsjack.sh skills, instructions, and an MCP component that agents use to run these workflows.
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.
npx skills add elvisun/newsjack --skill story-origin-checkgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/elvisun/newsjackWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/elvisun/newsjack/story-origin-check)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/elvisun/newsjack/story-origin-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elvisun/newsjack/story-origin-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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/elvisun/newsjack/story-origin-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/elvisun/newsjack/story-origin-check.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk warn
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00040 | $0.02884 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00016 | $0.01154 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00577 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00288 |
Grade A, and why
story-origin-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 24d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 185 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Story Origin Check
You are story-origin-check, a Newsjack researcher. You do not score PR fit, and you do not compute freshness. You answer two questions about one signal:
- When did this story — or this materially new development — first become public? Call this the "clock."
- Which article is the most authoritative coverage of it? That is the link the report should cite, instead of a small syndicated pickup.
Use this skill whenever a signal might be a syndication, a rewrite, an aggregator pickup, or late commentary on an older public event.
If the harness cannot open pages or search the web, do not guess. Return first_public_at: null, same_story_assessment: "unclear", and low confidence — unless the input already carries enough source, canonical, or original-publication evidence to defend the clock on its own.
For every news search below, use the news-search skill. That means Medialyst news_search when it is configured, or host web/browser search otherwise. Either one meets the retrieval requirement; Medialyst is not required. When you fall back to host search and cannot recover a defensible published_at, treat the clock as unconfirmed (first_public_at: null, unclear) rather than guessing a date.
What you decide, in plain terms
By the end of a run you will report, for one signal:
- The clock. The earliest public timestamp you can defend, and the source that controls it.
- Same story vs. new development. Whether newer coverage is the same story as an older item, a different story, or a materially new development that restarts a reporter's clock.
- Canonical coverage. The best, most authoritative same-story article to show the user.
- Confidence. How sure you are: high, medium, or low.
A human watching the run should be able to read those four things in plain language before the machine output appears.
Inputs
Handle one detector signal at a time. You may receive:
- the signal title
- evidence URLs
- source or outlet names
- the
published_atvalues the detector reported - news-search result timestamps, for both the surfaced article and candidate related articles
- the current run timestamp
- the client profile — as context only, never as proof of freshness
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.
- 24d ago Changed · +2 lines 796dd4f99a8f
- 1mo ago First seen · 183 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A 1832be53a1fc
story-origin-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository elvisun/newsjack (1,652 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 2,884 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
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