Staying Informed: A Market-Awareness Digest

This lesson builds a market-awareness workflow: a short list of websites or public feeds gets checked regularly, only what's genuinely new gets summarized — with real context about what's already been seen — and a digest email lands in your inbox. This is the same check-something-new shape as Lesson 4.3, now aimed at staying current for content generation and market awareness, which is exactly why Marketing teams reach for this pattern most often. If Legal, HR, or Industrial Engineering is your role, this same shape fits a docket check, a compliance-portal sweep, or a nonconformance scan equally well — the "sources" are just different.

Staying informed usually means checking the same handful of sites over and over, most of the time finding nothing new. A digest that only reports genuine changes — and remembers what it already told you — turns that daily chore into a five-minute read that shows up on its own.

1Choose Your Sources

Before building anything, pick what you're actually going to watch.

1. List 3 to 6 sources that matter to your work: a competitor's press or product page, an industry news site, a regulator's announcement page, a public feed.
2. Prefer pages with a stable, predictable structure (a press-release list, a blog index) over ones that change layout constantly.
3. Read the callout below before assuming this lesson covers every social platform.

2Dictate the Workflow

Describe the whole digest in one message, the same dictate-to-setup pattern from Lesson 4.3.

1. Create a new folder, for example market-digest, and open it in Claude Code.
2. Adapt and send the example dictation below.
3. Answer any clarifying questions.
4. Review the proposed CLAUDE.md before approving.

I want to monitor a short list of websites for anything new that
matters to our marketing team. Here are the sources: [list your 3-6
URLs]. I care about mentions of these topics: our top three
competitors by name, pricing changes, and new product announcements
in our category. Ignore anything that doesn't touch one of those
topics. When something new shows up, I want it summarized with
context — if this is the second or third time a competitor has done
something similar recently, say so, don't just report it in
isolation. Once a batch of new items is ready, send me an email digest
with a short summary of each item, why it matters, and a link back to
the source. Set this up as a project with a README and a CLAUDE.md
capturing my topics and sources, and ask me anything you need first.

What Claude Code should produce:

market-digest/
├── README.md              Explains the workflow
├── CLAUDE.md               Standing rules: sources, topics,
│                           digest tone and length
├── data/
│   └── knowledge-log.md   Everything already seen and reported
└── drafts/
    └── digest-drafts/     Saved digests, in case email isn't set up

3Build the Two-Skill Plugin

Two skills: one that watches, one that reports. This reuses the exact plugin file structure from Lesson 4.3 — .claude-plugin/marketplace.json, plugins/<name>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json, skills/<name>/SKILL.md — so this step focuses on what's different: the two skills themselves.

1. Ask Claude Code to build /scan-sources first, using the description below.
2. Review its SKILL.md, then ask for /send-digest.
3. Run /scan-sources, then /send-digest, and check the resulting email or draft.

Skill 1 — /scan-sources. What to tell Claude Code to build:

Build a skill called scan-sources. Its job: fetch each website listed
in CLAUDE.md, extract anything published or updated since the last
run, and compare it against data/knowledge-log.md. Keep only items
matching our topics in CLAUDE.md. For each new, on-topic item, append
it to the log with its source, date, topic match, and a one-line
summary, marked "new — not yet digested."

What this produces (skills/scan-sources/SKILL.md, abbreviated):

---
name: scan-sources
description: Fetch each monitored source, keep only new items matching
our topics, and log them. Use when the user says "check my sources"
or "/scan-sources."
---

# scan-sources

1. Read the source list and topic list from CLAUDE.md.
2. Fetch each source with WebFetch.
3. Read data/knowledge-log.md — everything already logged, ever.
4. Identify content on each source not already in the log.
5. Keep only new items matching a topic from CLAUDE.md; discard the rest.
6. Append each kept item to the log: source, date, topic, one-line
   summary, status "new — not yet digested."
7. Report how many new, on-topic items were found.

Skill 2 — /send-digest. What to tell Claude Code to build:

Build a skill called send-digest. Its job: find every item in
data/knowledge-log.md still marked "new — not yet digested." For each
one, check the log for earlier entries on the same topic or
competitor, and note the pattern if this is a repeat — for example,
"third pricing mention from this competitor in two weeks." Compose one
email digest: each item with its summary, its context note if there
is one, and a link back to the source. Send it using the email
connector if one is set up, or save it to drafts/digest-drafts/ if
not. Mark each included item "digested" in the log.

What this produces (skills/send-digest/SKILL.md, abbreviated):

---
name: send-digest
description: Compile every undigested item into one contextual email
digest and send it, or save a draft if no email connector exists.
Use when the user says "send my digest" or "/send-digest."
---

# send-digest

1. Read data/knowledge-log.md. Find every item marked "new — not yet
   digested."
2. For each item, scan the rest of the log for earlier entries on the
   same topic or competitor. If found, note the pattern (e.g., "third
   mention this month").
3. Compose one digest: item summary, context note if any, and source
   link, grouped by topic.
4. Send the digest via the connected email tool. If none is connected,
   save it to drafts/digest-drafts/<date>-digest.md instead.
5. Mark every included item "digested" in the log.

Sample digest:

Subject: Market Digest — Tuesday

Competitor Pricing
Aria Corp dropped its entry-tier price by 15% (announced today). This
is the third pricing move from Aria in the last two weeks — worth
flagging to the pricing team. [source]

New Product Announcements
Northwind Labs announced a beta for a feature similar to ours,
launching next month. No prior mentions from Northwind on this topic.
[source]

4Optional — Run It on a Schedule

Once the two skills work, running them without you is the same pattern from Lessons 4.3 and 4.5.

Windows

1. Before proceeding, revisit Lesson 4.1, Step 4 — confirm you trust both skills' output from manual runs first.
2. Open Windows Task Scheduler.
3. Create a task that runs both commands in sequence, on whatever cadence fits — daily for fast-moving topics, weekly for slower ones.

claude -p "/scan-sources" --cwd "C:\path\to\market-digest"
claude -p "/send-digest" --cwd "C:\path\to\market-digest"

Mac

1. Before proceeding, revisit Lesson 4.1, Step 4 — confirm you trust both skills' output from manual runs first.
2. Open Terminal and run crontab -e (opens in the nano editor by default).
3. Add both lines below on the cadence that fits, then save (Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X in nano).

0 8 * * * claude -p "/scan-sources" --cwd "$HOME/market-digest"
5 8 * * * claude -p "/send-digest" --cwd "$HOME/market-digest"

Verification

Related Resources

• claude.ai — The Claude AI platform
• code.claude.com/docs — Official documentation
• support.claude.com — Help center and troubleshooting