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.
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 isn't how you get content in. It is whether you can get it out. Here is the exit we built into Mastheads, and why it lives where it does.
Narrower is the feature
For most of its life Mastheads was a general-news engine. This week it learned to run a newsroom for one specific niche - and a newsroom with a beat writes very differently than one covering the 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. Here's the real line between the two, and how to make sure your articles land 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. Here's why that line matters more than anything else.
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. Lock-in is a choice you don't have to accept.
How to keep a website current without writing every post yourself
The reason sites go stale is almost never the writing. It's everything around the writing. Here's what actually keeps a publication current — and how to make it happen on its own.
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. Here's what got scarce instead — and why it's the only thing worth competing on now.
A day in the newsroom
Follow one story from a morning idea to a published page — and see why a finished article is the easy part.
Show your work
Trust isn't a claim you make. It's evidence you can produce. Every article should be able to show where it came from — and no risky image should ever reach your readers without your say-so.
A masthead is a voice, not just a domain
Anyone can point an automation at a website. The thing readers actually come back for is a voice — a byline they recognise, a point of view, a place that sounds like someone. That part is a choice you get to make.
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