| name | beat-brief |
| description | Draft a short daily beat briefing from a folder of incoming source documents. Use when the reporter wants a five-bullet summary of the day's material with attribution flags and follow-up actions. |
Beat brief
Reads a folder of incoming source material on a beat and produces a short daily briefing for the reporter covering it.
When to use
- The reporter has a folder of fresh material — minutes, press releases, interview notes, tips — and wants a quick read on what's in it
- A briefing needs to land in the reporter's hands at the start of a shift
- A new reporter is filling in on a beat and needs a one-page orientation to today's material
What it does
When this skill is loaded, Claude will:
- Read every file in the source folder the user names (default:
sample-docs/)
- Draft a five-bullet briefing in plain news voice. One sentence per bullet. Each bullet cites the file it's drawn from in parentheses.
- Flag any claim presented as fact that is not attributed to a named source or a primary document
- End with a "what to follow up" list of concrete reporter actions, each one doable in under 30 minutes
Output rules
- Sentence case throughout. No Title Case.
- No exclamation points
- Plain news voice — no editorializing, no adjectives like "important" or "critical"
- Five bullets, no more, no fewer
- The follow-up list is concrete: a number to call, a record to pull, a person to find
Plugin vs project skill
This skill is the plugin-bundled version of the same idea that lives at .claude/commands/beat-brief.md in the MOOC starter kit. The two have different shapes on purpose:
- The slash command (
.claude/commands/beat-brief.md) is a one-shot prompt the student runs by typing . It only exists inside the starter kit repo.
