Dear {{ first_name | reader }},
This isn't a regular edition. No crisis debrief, no framework, no research findings. Just a tool and an honest explanation of why it exists.
A few weeks ago I built something. A structured AI skill, a set of instructions you install into Claude, that turns it into a sharp-elbowed press release editor.
The kind that refuses to start writing until it's asked you the uncomfortable questions. The kind that bans 'world-class' and 'innovative' and 'we are committed to transparency'. 🥱
The kind that forces you to answer who your real audience is – not the journalist but the person behind the journalist – and what exactly you want them to think, feel, or do differently.
It took a while to get right. It has been battle tested. I'm giving it away for free.
Here's why.
I wrote a few weeks ago about the line between intelligence and judgement, the argument that AI is absorbing the pattern-recognition, research, and formatting work of our profession, leaving the strategic calls to those who have the experience to make them.
Press releases were right there in my argument. I called it intelligence work. I'll go further: writing them is not a value-added activity. It never really was. It was always the thinking behind them that mattered; the audience, the angle, the judgement call about what to say and what to leave out.
But here's what I didn't say clearly enough: intelligence work done badly still causes damage.
A press release written by someone who doesn't understand the audience chain fails the organisation it was supposed to serve. A quote that sounds like it was written by a committee rather than a human being erodes credibility quietly, over time, in ways that are hard to trace back to the source.
The skill exists because there's a right way and a wrong way to do even the operational work. And because a generation of communicators (the one I wrote about, the one that deserves better tools than we had) shouldn't have to learn the hard way that 'innovative solutions provider' is a phrase that makes journalists delete emails.
So. Here it is.