Introduction
What Mastheads is, what it writes, and how to start writing your first article.
Mastheads writes source-backed articles. You give it a topic, a list, a structure, a URL or your own brief. It researches real sources, writes from them in your voice, checks the claims against what it found, draws a cover image, and hands you a finished article with a named byline. You publish it to your CMS, export it, or let the built-in newsroom handle it on a schedule.
Every article shows its work. Open any article and you can see what it was written from, which checks ran, what passed, what failed, and who the editor of record is. Nothing ships silently. That is the difference between an article you can put your name on and one you cannot.
On this page
Who it is for
Publishers, agencies, and operators who want articles at scale without lowering their standard. A solo operator running a niche site uses it. An agency producing content for ten clients uses the same tool. The ten editorial desks run the same way for everyone - the plans differ only in how many sites, seats, and articles you need.
What happens when you ask for an article
Every article moves through ten editorial desks in a fixed order:
- Editorial Director turns your request into a clear assignment with a headline, angle, and the questions the article should answer.
- Source Desk searches in your words, opens the results, reads every chosen page in full, and selects the real sources for the article.
- Planning Desk builds a section-by-section plan from what the sources actually say, with supported facts assigned to each section.
- Writers Desk writes the article from the evidence, in your publication's voice, with inline citations pointing back to the sources.
- Fact Desk tests every name, number, date, and factual claim against the research record. What does not trace to a source is cut or marked for your review.
- QA Desk checks that the article delivers on its headline, removes filler, and prepares an honest search title, description, and keywords.
- Editor-in-Chief reads the article fresh and rewrites weak or crowded paragraphs while keeping every established fact and source.
- Standards Desk applies the same house standards to every article, repairs certain faults, and records key measures.
- Art Desk draws an original cover image for the article while the words receive their final checks.
- Production Desk assembles the checked text, image, search details, and desk records into the finished article on your dashboard.
The full pass is on How an article happens. Each desk has its own page, linked from The ten desks.
Research is on by default
Research means the article is written from real, fetched sources - not from the model's own knowledge. This is on by default. Every researched article carries inline citations and an authenticity trace so your reader can check what it was written from.
You can turn research off for a faster draft written from the model's knowledge alone. That draft has no citations and no source list, because there are no sources to cite. Both kinds of article pass through the same editorial desks.
You stay in control
Review is the default. New domains start in review mode, which means drafts only. Articles arrive on your dashboard for your approval before anything is published. Auto-publish is something you turn on yourself, per domain, when you are ready.
Every article carries a record of what each desk found - including failures. If the Fact Desk could not verify a claim, it says so on the article. If a source went down between research and writing, that is recorded too. You see the full picture before you press Publish.
The autonomous newsroom
The newsroom is one of the ways to use Mastheads. You brief it once - your topics, your voice, your publishing schedule, and where to publish - and it finds stories worth covering and produces them on your schedule. You set one up from your own web address, and you switch it on yourself.
This is not a separate product. It runs the same ten editorial desks, on the same articles, with the same checks. The difference is that you set the direction once instead of asking for each article one at a time.
Eight ways to start an article
There is more than one way to ask for an article. Each one runs the same ten editorial desks - they differ only in how the brief is put together:
- Article one topic or headline, one article back.
- Assignment a list of topics, one article per row.
- Blueprint a reusable structure crossed with your own data.
- From a URL a page you already have, refreshed, rewritten, or beaten.
- Dossier your own brief and up to eight links, one article written from that material and nothing else.
- Head to head two subjects compared in one article.
- Ranked list a subject and a count, one ranked list back.
- Explainer a term or a list of terms, one definition piece each.
Where to start
- Quick start - create your first domain in a few minutes.
- Cover a topic - hand Mastheads a topic and get a researched article back.
- API reference - pull your articles into anything you build.