Advanced prompt engineering for journalists — starter kit

Track active work in MOOC starter kit maintenance.

A starter repo for the Knight Center MOOC on using AI coding tools from the command line. Fork this repo, clone your fork, cd into it, and run claude. Everything you need for the four modules is already here.

Course site: mooc.amditis.tech

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Instructor

Joe Amditis | Center for Cooperative Media, Montclair State University

GitHub | Substack | Twitter

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What this repo is

Your workspace for all four modules. By the end of the course, it’ll be a working AI-assisted journalism toolkit you’ve filled in with your own beat details — documented, version-controlled, and shareable.

• A context file scaffold (CLAUDE.md) with teaching comments and a fully worked example
• Memory and lessons files (MEMORY.md, LESSONS.md) showing the patterns from video A2
• Real Claude Code skills (skills/) with YAML frontmatter — the shape from video B1
• Slash commands (.claude/commands/) for beat briefings, SIFT-based claim checks, and cross-model review
• A one-way-door hook (.claude/hooks.json) — the guardrail pattern
• A minimal plugin skeleton (plugin/) — the shape from video B2
• Staged pipeline scripts (scripts/pipeline/) — the fetch → clean → process → save pattern
• A GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/weekly-digest.yml) — the cloud-detect side of the hybrid pattern
• Module 4 documentation (docs/context-management.md, docs/cross-model-review.md, docs/four-questions.md)
• A worked mini example (examples/mamdani-mini/) — the shape of the video B1 pipeline demo with synthetic data
• Sample journalism documents (sample-docs/) — fictional Greenfield city council beat fixtures
• Stubs for Codex and Gemini users (AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md) — if you’re not using Claude

Everything in the repo maps to a specific module and video in docs/module-map.md. Start there if you want the index.

Getting started

1. Fork this repo

Click Fork at the top right of the GitHub page. That gives you your own copy you can push to freely.

2. Clone your fork

git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/mooc-starter-kit.git
cd mooc-starter-kit

Replace YOUR-USERNAME with your GitHub username.

3. Install one AI CLI tool

You need Node.js (version 20+) and one of these: