Sign in Start free

Essays

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.

FeaturedPlaybook · September 23, 2026

The Jasper alternatives, compared by someone who built one

Seven tools people move to from Jasper, with the prices and limits taken from their own pricing pages on 23 September 2026, and what none of those pages says.

All essays

September 23, 2026·4 min read

How to audit old website content before you publish again

Learn how to audit old website content for broken links, outdated advice, duplicate pages and missing internal links before publishing something new.

September 18, 2026·5 min read

Should you outsource blog writing?

The honest version: when an agency is right, when a freelancer is right, and the part of the job you never get to hand over.

September 18, 2026·8 min read

Blog writing services, compared by a competitor

What five of them actually charge, taken from their own pricing pages on 18 September 2026, and why none of them hands you the evidence behind the article.

September 17, 2026·3 min read

Every article should show its work

The words are only the output. The sources, checks, shortfalls, and byline are the evidence.

September 11, 2026·4 min read

20,000 articles later, this is the ten-point check

The writing was never the hard part. The checking was. Ten questions to run on the last article published on your site, and Mastheads answers all ten before a draft reaches you.

September 7, 2026·5 min read

We deleted our own speed improvement

We made our AI slower on purpose. A change saved about four seconds per article and broke two articles in six. We deleted it and wrote down why.

September 2, 2026·3 min read

Your brief. Your links. Nothing else.

Every other way into Mastheads sends the desk out to find the story. Dossier does the opposite: you hand over the material and it writes from that and nothing else. And your brief is never turned into a citation.

August 9, 2026·3 min read

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.

August 6, 2026·3 min read

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.

August 6, 2026·3 min read

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.

July 31, 2026·4 min read

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.

July 22, 2026·2 min read

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.

July 22, 2026·5 min read

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.

July 22, 2026·4 min read

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.

July 20, 2026·2 min read

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.

July 15, 2026·2 min read

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.

July 12, 2026·2 min read

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.

July 11, 2026·2 min read

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.

July 10, 2026·4 min read

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.

June 29, 2026·4 min read

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.

June 23, 2026·4 min read

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.

June 22, 2026·3 min read

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.

June 21, 2026·4 min read

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.

June 20, 2026·3 min read

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.

June 19, 2026·3 min read

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.

June 18, 2026·3 min read

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.

June 17, 2026·3 min read

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.

Subscribe

Get notified.

One email per essay. No marketing fluff. Unsubscribe any time.