Pitches waiting in your drafts every morning.
Set up Claude to find the journalists covering your topic, read what they actually write, work out the story each one would want next, and leave short pitches in your Gmail drafts on weekday mornings. You approve every send.
Free. No email required, nothing to download.
This builds one thing: a project that studies journalists in your field and leaves short, specific pitches in your Gmail drafts. Nothing sends on its own. You read every draft and press send yourself.
The automation needs a paid plan. Skills are on Free, but Cowork and scheduled tasks are Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise only, and adding a custom connector also needs a paid subscription. On the free plan you can still build the dossier and run the two skills by hand, which is most of the value. Only the weekday scheduling is out of reach.
Build it in Cowork rather than in an ordinary chat. The reason is practical: these skills write and update files as they go, a journalist list and an angles file, and a chat project holds files you upload rather than files Claude maintains. Cowork works inside a folder you give it and can read from and write to it. Projects are shared between Cowork and Claude, so the dossier and instructions you set up are the same in both.
Cowork is on Claude Desktop for macOS and Windows, on the web, on mobile and in the Chrome side panel. Make a folder on your computer called Publicist before you start, and point the project at it.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and looked at what correlates with a brand showing up in Google's AI Overviews. Branded web mentions came out at 0.664. Backlinks came out at 0.218. In other words, being talked about on other websites tracked far more closely with being named in an AI answer than being linked to did.
Worth being precise about what that study covers, because it gets stretched online. It measured Google's AI Overviews. It did not measure ChatGPT or Claude, and it shows correlation rather than cause. It is still the best public evidence that mentions matter more than most people assume, which is the argument for doing any of this.
The other half of the argument is cost. PR agencies in Australia typically charge a monthly retainer of $2,000 to $10,000 or more. A dossier and two skills will not replace a good publicist with real relationships. It will get you specific pitches going out consistently, which is the part most small businesses never manage at all.
Open Cowork, create a project called Publicist, and set its context to the folder you made. Then build the dossier, which is the file every pitch is drawn from. Without it Claude writes pitches about a generic business in your industry, and journalists bin those.
Do not write the dossier yourself. Let it interview you.
Answer in plain sentences. The section that matters most is the numbers only you have.
Interview me to build a press dossier for my business. Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer. Do not move on until I answer or say skip. Work through: 1. What we do, in one sentence a stranger would understand. 2. Five to eight topics I could be interviewed on tomorrow with no preparation. 3. Topics I must never be quoted on. 4. Numbers only my business has: our own data, our results, trends we see in our work that are not published anywhere. 5. Things I have seen in this industry that most people in it have not. 6. Two opinions I would defend publicly, including the uncomfortable one. 7. My title, my location, and anywhere I have been quoted before. Push back once if an answer is vague or could have been said by any business in my field. Never invent a fact, a number or a result. Where I did not answer, write TO FILL IN. Then write it up as press-dossier.md in the project folder, under clear headings, keeping my exact wording wherever you can.
A dossier where the "numbers only we have" section would genuinely interest a stranger. If that section is thin, stop and fix it before going further. Everything downstream is built on it.
Then add one line to the project instructions: "Always read press-dossier.md before any press work. Never invent a fact, number or result."
Two connections. Gmail, so the pitches land in your drafts, and a reading tool, so Claude can actually open author pages and articles.
The Google Workspace connectors are available on every Claude plan. On Team and Enterprise an owner has to enable connectors for the organisation first.
The Gmail connector can send, reply and forward, not only draft. By default Claude asks for your approval before each of those actions, and on Team and Enterprise an owner can switch that approval off. Leave it on. Every prompt below tells Claude to save a draft and never send, but the approval prompt is the backstop that matters, so check it before you connect anything.
For reading, use Firecrawl. Plenty of news sites block automated browsers, so without a proper reading tool Claude quietly fails to reach a good share of the journalists and you never find out which ones. Firecrawl has an official connector in Claude's connector directory, so there is no MCP address to paste and no API key to manage. Its free tier starts at 500 credits with no card, and a page read or a search costs one credit, which is enough to work through a first batch of journalists.
Done looks like this: ask Claude to draft a test email to yourself, approve it, and check it appears in your Gmail drafts rather than your sent folder. Do that before you build the skills.
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The first skill builds your list and then does the reading. Keep those as one skill but two phases, because the reading is what makes the pitches land and it is the part everyone skips.
Run this once. Claude writes the skill, then you run the skill whenever you want new names.
Create a skill called press-find-and-study. When I run it: Phase one, build the list. 1. Read press-dossier.md. 2. Search the news for articles from the last 60 days on each of my topics. 3. Open them and note who wrote each one. Prefer feature writers and columnists over wire reporters. 4. Add up to 20 journalists to press-targets.md: name, outlet, their beat in plain words, and the article where you found them with its link and date. 5. Never add the same person twice. Check the file first. Phase two, study them. In batches of eight: 1. Open each journalist's author page and their two most recent articles. 2. Under their name in press-targets.md, write: the three topics they keep returning to, the angle they take, who they usually quote, a question they have raised and not answered, and their latest piece with its date. Rules: - Never describe what someone writes from memory. If you did not open it, you do not know it. - If a page will not load, mark them BLOCKED and move on. - If their most recent piece is more than four months old, mark them STALE. Finish by telling me how many you studied, how many were blocked, and how many are still waiting.
Done looks like this: read one journalist's profile and you could guess what they will write about next. If you cannot, the reading phase did not really happen, and you should check whether pages were being blocked.
The second skill does the thinking, then writes. It invents the story each journalist would want next, with you as the person who can speak to it, and only then writes the email.
The order matters. Angles first, into their own file, so you can read them before any email exists.
Create a skill called press-angle-and-pitch. When I run it, for each studied journalist in press-targets.md: Phase one, the angle. Read their profile and press-dossier.md, then write into press-angles.md: 1. A headline written the way they would write it, about the story rather than about my company. 2. Which piece of theirs it follows on from. 3. Why it is a story this month and not six months ago. 4. The one thing I can give them that nobody else can, pulled from the dossier. 5. What I will hand over: numbers, examples, access, an interview. If the dossier holds nothing real for this journalist, write NOTHING TO OFFER and skip them. One angle each, and every angle different from the others. Phase two, the address. Find their email: their author page first, then their own site, then the outlet's published address pattern. If you cannot verify it, mark NO ADDRESS and do not guess your way into sending. Phase three, the email. For each angle with an address: - Subject under 30 characters, naming the story. - Body 60 to 100 words. - First sentence is the story. Second is why now. Third is what I can give and why me. Last line is one direct ask. - No greeting, no "hope this finds you well", no flattery about their work, no buzzwords. - My voice, from the dossier. - Include my signature block exactly as it is in the dossier. Save each one as a Gmail draft. Never send. Then list what is waiting in my drafts.
Real drafts to verified addresses, each under 100 words. The test: you would be happy for someone to read one over your shoulder.
Before anything goes out, put a real postal address in your signature and one plain line telling them how to be left alone, and honour it the same day it comes back. This is ordinary practice for outreach you have not been invited to send, and it is also the difference between a pitch and spam. Keep a note of anyone who asks out and have the skill skip them.
Add this to the same skill, or keep it as a short second one.
Add a follow-up rule to press-angle-and-pitch. Four days after a pitch with no reply, draft one follow-up, under 50 words, that adds something new: a fresher number, a development since, or a different angle on the same story. Never just ask again. Never follow up more than once. After that, leave them alone and note the date in press-targets.md. If anyone has asked not to be contacted, skip them entirely and never draft to them again.
One follow-up, with something new in it, and then silence. That is the whole etiquette.
Run both skills manually first and read press-angles.md before you look at a single email. A dull angle cannot be rescued by a well written email, and reading the angles is how you find out whether the dossier is doing its job.
Once two rounds have produced drafts you would actually send, schedule it. In Cowork, open Scheduled in the left sidebar, choose New task, then either Create with Claude or Set up manually. Set it to run on weekdays, point it at your Publicist folder, and give it the instruction below.
Set the time to an hour before you normally start, so the drafts are there when you open your email.
Every weekday at 7am, working in the Publicist folder: 1. Run press-find-and-study, but only on journalists who are not already in press-targets.md. 2. Run press-angle-and-pitch on anyone newly studied. 3. Draft any follow-ups that are due under the follow-up rule. 4. Show me a short list of what is waiting in my drafts, and anything marked BLOCKED, STALE, NO ADDRESS or NOTHING TO OFFER. Never send anything. Drafts only.
Drafts appearing on a weekday morning without you starting anything.
One catch worth knowing. A scheduled task that needs local files runs only on your own machine, so it fires when your computer is on. If you want it running regardless, keep the dossier and the two files in your Claude account files rather than a local folder, and point the task there instead.
A project that knows what you can credibly speak about, a list of journalists it has actually read rather than guessed at, an angle for each one that follows on from their own work, and short pitches sitting in your drafts on weekday mornings with your hand on every send.
What good looks like is worth saying plainly, because the expectation is where people give up. Most pitches get no reply. That is normal and it is not a sign the thing is broken. One or two real conversations out of forty pitches is the system working. The compounding part is that every mention makes the next pitch easier, and the mentions are what AI answers draw on when someone asks for a recommendation in your field.
The two things to keep an eye on: the dossier goes stale, so revisit the numbers section every quarter, and the angles file tells you more than the drafts do. If the angles get repetitive, you have run out of story rather than run out of journalists.
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