Voice & quality

Voice and bylines

Set how each publication sounds - tone, reading level, audience, banned words, standing instructions - and publish under real named bylines with one editor of record.

An article you put your name on has to sound like you, and it has to say who wrote it. Mastheads handles both per domain: a voice the writer follows on every article, and a masthead of real names the articles publish under.

On this page

Where the voice lives

Each domain has its own voice, in its Article defaults. Your profile has one too, for articles you write without a domain. One customer running five publications can give each one a different voice.

The dials

Three preset pickers, on every plan:

Tone - natural, professional, conversational, technical, friendly or authoritative.
Reading level - simple, general, advanced or expert. The default is General - Grade 9-11.
Point of view - third person, second person ("you"), or first person plural ("we").

The voice you write yourself

There is no list of house styles to choose from. You describe the voice in your own words:

Audience - who the articles are for, in a sentence: "small business owners in Ireland who do their own books".
Standing instructions - what the writer should always or never do: "Use metric units. Explain any acronym the first time. Never recommend a specific bank."
Banned words - words and phrases you never want in your articles.

These are available on every plan, including the trial.

Instructions, not filters

Worth knowing where the line is. The voice settings are instructions the writer follows, not filters run over the finished article. Two rules are enforced in code after the draft comes back - no long dashes, and only links to real sources - but a banned word is an instruction, so one can still slip through. Check for it in review.

Read my site's voice

Not sure how to describe your voice? On a domain's Article defaults, press Read my site's voice. Mastheads reads a handful of your site's longest pages and proposes settings for every dial - tone, reading level, point of view, audience, banned words and standing instructions.

Beside the proposal it shows the numbers behind it - reading grade, words per sentence, contractions - and the same numbers for the articles Mastheads has written for that site. So if the articles are drifting from your house style, you see it as a figure, not a feeling.

Nothing changes until you press Apply on a dial; each dial has its own. This works for domains verified with Google Search Console, because it reads your site. A domain with its autonomous newsroom switched on gets a fresh proposal in the background each month.

The masthead: who the articles are by

Every domain has a masthead - the named people it publishes under. Add them on the domain's Masthead page. For each author you can set a name, a title, a short biography and the sections they write for.

Pick the byline per article in the editor, from that domain's authors.
Leave it unpicked and the article publishes under the domain's editor of record.
Name nobody and the byline is the publication's own name, as it was before you added anyone.

An author's contact email stays private unless you switch it on for that author, per person.

The editor of record

One author per domain can be the editor of record - the person accountable for the publication. There can only be one, because "who is responsible?" cannot have two answers. The editor of record:

is the byline for any article where none is picked
is required to switch on the autonomous newsroom, and is checked every time it writes. Remove the editor of record and the newsroom stops writing on its own until a new one is named.

Bylines on WordPress

For a domain connected to a WordPress.org site:

Match an author to a WordPress user. On the Masthead page, each author gets a picker listing your site's own writers. Pick one and that author's posts are filed under that WordPress user, so your site's author pages show the right person.
Add a writer straight from WordPress. Writers already on your site but not yet on the masthead are listed with an Add button. Adding one brings across their name, username and WordPress biography.

Mastheads never creates or changes a user on your site.

Every language, the same voice

The same voice system - dials, instructions, bylines - applies in whichever language a domain writes. See Languages.