Automating Local Media Workflows with Claude MCP

TJ and Shane Brady spend this episode on one idea: you can now sit inside Claude and tell it to do the clicking in your newsletter software. Beehiiv had just announced an official MCP server, but TJ did not have access yet. He didn't need it, because Shane had already built his own.

What an MCP server actually is

Shane's one-line version: an MCP server packages up a software tool's API routes so a chatbot such as Claude or ChatGPT can talk to that software. In his words, it is just a way to talk in natural language to your data or to do things. The name sounds technical, but he says not to let it scare you.

His prediction is that in the next 6 to 12 months, people will move from working inside software screens to working inside Claude or a similar assistant. He and TJ both say Claude is the one to use right now.

Read-only versus read and write

TJ said the Beehiiv email described read access only: you can pull data, ask questions and get reports, but you can't act. Shane's server, which he built a month or two earlier, has write access. Used from Claude, things that used to take an hour take about five seconds.

Shane works in Claude Cowork, the desktop app. He pointed out that Cowork can run tasks on a schedule and can be reached from your phone. You can install his server from GitHub and he says it takes about two commands. He suggests everyone sign up for a free GitHub account, and ask Claude whenever a step is unclear.

A dashboard Claude built unasked

Shane had connected Claude to TJ's 25 Beehiiv publications. He spoke his request instead of typing it, and Claude pulled in TJ's top 10. Then he asked for the metrics that matter and a chart of subscribers over four weeks.

Instead of a basic chart, Claude built a full interactive dashboard with total subscribers, average open and click rates, an engagement radar chart and a table for every publication. TJ noticed almost 5 million emails sent across them. He also liked that it solves a real annoyance: in Beehiiv he has to switch between publications through a dropdown, one at a time.

Finding business owners on a subscriber list

For the harder test, TJ picked his Leander Scoop list. He asked Claude to find everyone from his business-owner survey, then go through the whole list and pull every domain that was not Gmail, Yahoo or another generic address, and build an Excel file of the companies.

Claude came back with 179 unique business domains, grouped by type, such as UT Austin and general business. Shane asked it to tag them, and by the end they were sitting in Beehiiv. TJ says people who skip a signup survey can use this to find their business owners anyway.

TJ gave two uses for the list. One is an email pitching sponsorships to warm subscribers, which beats cold emailing local businesses. The other is a business edition of an existing newsletter. A partner of his does this: the business owners get a business-focused issue, which is simpler than launching a second newsletter.

Pages, designs and a fast-moving month

Next Shane described a custom subscribe page. Claude builds the page, and the email goes into your email platform through its API, so it works like the standard form but looks better. Then he tried Canva. He doesn't have a paid Canva account, so it couldn't finish a header, but he explained that with your own template Claude would give you a few versions to choose from.

On how fast things move, TJ says Claude's context window is now 1 million, so long jobs are less likely to fall apart. TJ also pointed out that OpenAI had shut down its AI video product the day before, despite a Disney deal he put at a billion dollars. His read is that the real money is in business tools like these.

When Claude says it can't

Both hosts came back to the same habit: don't accept the first no. TJ has told Claude in its instructions not to ask him to do things it can do itself, and it still sometimes says "I did 90% of this, now you go to GitHub." He just writes back that he is not going to do it and that it should find a way around. It usually does.

Shane's explanation is that Claude tries to be efficient and grabs the easiest route it knows. His tricks: open a fresh chat and ask again, since another window can give a different answer, and push the biggest models for heavy jobs. This demo ran on Opus 4.6, which he picked because it was chewing through a large data set and many prompts.

What they plan to cover next

This is the first of a new kind of episode, with Shane and TJ talking shop instead of interviewing a guest. Shane listed what he wants to film: writing and content creation without opening 100 tabs, a way to reach advertisers through Claude, and event collection that he says costs about $5 a month. He also wants to show semi-automated social media, since posting to Instagram and TikTok was the thing he disliked most as a publisher. TJ added media kits whose numbers update on their own.

TJ is most excited about advertiser outreach: pulling local advertisers' details, then DMing them on Instagram, cold emailing and reaching out on LinkedIn. He says this was theoretically possible a year or two ago but painful and fragile, and now it is easy and good.

How to start

On cost, Shane says the $20 plan is a fine place to start. Opus uses more per task, so on that plan use Sonnet or Haiku for simple jobs. Shane, who is on the $200 plan, just leaves it on Opus. His server can't publish, only save drafts, so the worst you can do is make an extra segment.