The blank slate problem
Every time you open a new chat with an AI tool, it has no memory of previous conversations. It doesn't know your beat, your publication, your style guide, your sources, or what you worked on last week. You start from zero every session.
For ongoing investigative work, starting blank means spending the first few minutes of every session re-explaining your beat, your style rules, your sources — time that comes out of the actual reporting.
What a context file does
A context file — called CLAUDE.md for Claude Code — is a plain text file you create in your project folder. When you start a session, Claude reads it automatically before you type anything.
You write the briefing once. The AI gets it every time, without you pasting it in manually.
Beat reporters often keep a running document — source sheets, beat notes, a contact list with context — that captures what they'd otherwise have to reconstruct from memory. Before this course, you were doing that same job manually at the start of every AI session: pasting in background, re-explaining your beat, re-stating your preferences. The context file takes over that job. Claude reads it at session start so you don't have to.
What goes in a context file
A context file should contain what makes your project different from every other project — not what's true of all journalism. Common contents for journalism work:
- — Your beat and publication
- — Key people, organizations, and their relationships to your stories
- — Style preferences (AP style, your publication's house style)
- — Recurring tasks you want handled consistently
- — Folder structure for your project files
Project context vs. global context
You can have multiple context files. A global one covers preferences that apply to all your work — your writing style, common instructions. A project-level one lives inside a specific story folder and covers just that investigation.
When you're inside a project folder, Claude reads both: global context first, then project context. General rules live in one place, project-specific details in another. You don't repeat yourself.
What this changes about how you work
With a context file, your first message in a session can be the actual task — not the background. "Analyze the new budget documents against last year's" instead of "I'm a reporter covering city hall, our publication is X, here's some background..."
The setup cost shifts from every session to once per project.
NEXT: Head to Module 2 to write your first context file for a real journalism project.