Autonomy & coverage

Topics and coverage area

What the autonomous newsroom looks for - the topics you cover, up to five places it searches first, the outlets it trusts and the ones it never uses.

The autonomous newsroom only writes inside the limits you set. This page covers those limits: the topics it covers, the places it looks first, and the outlets it leans on or leaves alone.

On this page

Topics you cover

Topics are the subjects the newsroom looks for stories in - for a local news site, "Council and politics", "Business", "Sport"; for a trade blog, "Heat pumps", "Solar", "Grants and funding".

Where they come from. When you set up a domain from your website, the scan reads the sections your site already has and proposes them as topics. You correct the list before the domain is created, and can change it any time on the domain's page.
How they are used. Each topic is searched exactly as you wrote it. A topic should be a section, not a single story: "Home energy", not "the new boiler grant".

Coverage area: up to five places

Give a domain a coverage area and the newsroom looks close to home before it looks anywhere else. Add up to five places - towns, municipalities or regions - picked from a worldwide list of place names.

When the newsroom looks for stories:

It searches every topic in each of your places first.
Then the country's top stories and what is trending nationally fill the rest.

Local first, national fills the rest. The search takes turns across your topics and places, so every topic and every place is reached over time, not only the first on the list.

Leave the coverage area empty and the newsroom works your topics at national level.

What a newsroom story needs

A story the newsroom finds itself must rest on at least two fresh, independent sources before it is written. A wire story carried word for word by five outlets still counts as one source. A story that cannot meet that floor is not written.

Outlets it trusts

Every time you publish an article, Mastheads records which outlets it cited, for that publication and that topic, and reads those outlets first the next time it searches. A publication that has published from its country's own papers learns them, without anyone typing a list.

Outlets it never uses

Each domain keeps a list of ignored outlets - paywalled sites, a competitor, anywhere you never want cited. An ignored outlet is never fetched and never cited, by the newsroom or by any article you ask for on that domain. It is a hard filter applied before any page is read, not a lower ranking. Set it in the domain's Article defaults.

Monthly upkeep, included

For a domain with its newsroom switched on and Google Search Console connected, Mastheads runs monthly upkeep in the background, free of your allowances:

a re-crawl of your site - its page titles, sections and outbound links refresh the newsroom's memory of the outlets your site trusts
on a paid plan, a research report - its suggestions for what to cover next become story ideas

See Research and Quorl.