Field notes from the desk.
Writing on what it takes to keep a publication current - the judgement, the craft, and the quiet discipline of staying in charge of your own masthead. Curious what runs the desk behind these essays? Start with what an autonomous AI newsroom is.
Somebody already wrote it. That is the useful part.
Hand almost any AI writer a URL and it will write you something confident, whether or not the page loaded. Mastheads reads the page first, and names the one it could not reach.
You never pick a mode
A menu of modes is a question the software asks because it would rather not read your input. Mastheads opens on one field now, and what you typed decides - but it shows you what it decided before you spend anything.
Your next hundred articles are already on your site
Nobody running a content site is short of ideas. What they are missing is the list of what has gone stale - and their own sitemap has had that list the whole time.
The newsroom now takes requests
Nine desks that find real sources and check what they write are what Mastheads is. This release is about how much work you can now get to them - and the two rules we would not trade away for speed.
The full engine, none of the keys
Publish access to your site is a big ask - refusing it is a healthy instinct. Draft-only mode runs the entire newsroom and never touches your site.
The cheap article is the expensive one
The honest answer to 'why does yours cost more': a cheap article is not cheap, it is a cost you deferred at bad interest. Here are the three invoices.
Links you didn't earn
Backlink exchange sounds friendly. It quietly trades your links across strangers' sites - the exact pattern Google spent two years learning to catch.
Written in the language, not translated into it
Most 'multilingual' AI content is English underneath, and readers can feel it. Why Mastheads writes natively in the reader's language instead.
The newsroom that says no
Anyone can generate an article. The hard part is a pipeline that can refuse to publish one - and that refusal is what makes everything else trustworthy.
We put the export button on the cancel screen
The honest test of a content tool is whether you can get your content out. Here is the exit we built, and why it lives on the cancel screen.
Narrower is the feature
Mastheads learned to run a newsroom for one specific niche - and a focused newsroom writes very differently than one covering the whole world.
Twenty thousand articles later
I've published more than 20,000 AI-written articles on my own sites. Here's what actually breaks at scale - and what we had to engineer so it wouldn't.
Does Google penalize AI content?
Google doesn't penalize AI content - it demotes slop. The real line between the two, and how to keep your articles on the right side of it.
It runs itself. It still answers to you.
Automation usually asks you to give up the wheel. The better deal is a publication that does all the work and still waits for your word.
Publish once. Own everything.
Your site already lives somewhere - WordPress, Ghost, or your own pages. The right tool meets you there and lets you leave any time with everything intact.
How to keep a website current without writing every post yourself
Sites go stale because of everything around the writing, not the writing itself. What actually keeps a publication current, and how to automate it.
Why so much of the web suddenly reads like nobody's home
The cost of producing words fell to nothing, and the web filled up with the result. What got scarce instead is the only thing worth competing on.
A day in the newsroom
Follow one story from a morning idea to a published page - sourcing, fact-check, image, review - and see why the finished article is the easy part.
Show your work
Trust is evidence you can produce. Every article should show where it came from - and no risky image should reach your readers without your say-so.
A masthead is a voice, not just a domain
Anyone can point an automation at a website. Readers come back for a voice - a byline they recognise, a point of view, a place that sounds like someone.
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