The ways in

Blueprint

Save an article shape once - a headline pattern, its sections and its blanks - then cross it with your own values to get one source-backed article per combination.

A Blueprint is an article shape you save once and run again and again: a headline pattern, the sections every article must keep, and the blanks you fill in each time. Cross it with your own values and you get one article per combination.

It is built for sets: the best plumber in each of 30 towns, a guide to every product in a range, the same question asked for every country you serve.

Each combination is a full run of all ten editorial desks, with its own research and its own sources. It is not one article copied with the words swapped - which is what makes a set of forty read like forty articles.

Blueprints are included on every paid plan, from Starter up.

On this page

The headline pattern

The best {{service}} in {{place}}

Anything in double braces is a blank. Write {{place}} in the headline pattern, in a section heading, or in a section's guidance, and it becomes a value you fill at run time. You never declare blanks separately - they are found by reading the shape, so deleting the last mention of a blank removes it.

Once the blanks are filled, the headline goes to the desks as the title and is kept word for word.

What a section carries

Every section in the shape has four parts:

Heading - becomes a heading in the article and is kept exactly. The desks rewrite prose but never structure, so they cannot add, rename, reorder or drop one.
Kind - how the section is written: Prose, At a glance, Ranked items, Pros and cons, Questions, or Verdict. Each kind is a real instruction, so "Pros and cons" comes back as genuine advantages and honest drawbacks, not more prose.
Words - the section's length. The sections add up to the article's length: eight sections of 80 words is an article of about 640 words.
Guidance - what the section should actually cover.

Guidance is where the quality comes from. It is what stops forty articles in a set from reading like one article with the town name changed.

Each section also has a Citations setting:

Smart (the default) - cite where a claim needs its page.
On - this section must carry a source link.
Off - no links in this section.

Turning citations off changes how the section looks, never how it is sourced. The desks still research and check every claim in it.

A Blueprint has at most eight sections - the same ceiling as every other way in. Past that, more sections do not buy a longer article, just thinner sections.

Filling in the values

For each blank, type the values separated by commas or one per line - or load a value list. A value list is a table you save once, by pasting it in or loading a CSV file, and reuse in any Blueprint run.

A blank with no values stops the run, rather than letting {{place}} appear inside a real headline.

Every combination, or line up the rows

Every combination multiplies the lists: 2 services against 30 towns is 60 articles.
Line up rows pairs them by position instead - row 1 with row 1, row 2 with row 2 - and stops at the shortest list. Loading a value list switches to lining up, because a spreadsheet row already is the pairing.

Before you run it

The real number of articles is shown before you press anything, with what the run will cost. A run is up to 25 articles. Run it again after a capped run and it picks up where the last one stopped, so nothing is skipped and nothing is written twice.

You get one email for the whole run, with its counts.

Starters

Mastheads offers starter Blueprints to begin from. Picking one makes your own editable copy. Editing it changes nothing for anyone else.

Blueprint or Assignment?

Same shape, different values - a Blueprint.
Different topics, each its own article - an Assignment.