Built by operators.
Mastheads is a working editorial pipeline. We did not start out building a SaaS. We built the pipeline because we wanted to run real publications without hiring a newsroom for each.
Before Mastheads was a product, it was a problem we had. Every AI writing tool we tried optimized for the same thing - volume - and quietly handed back the part that actually mattered: the sourcing, the checking, the judgement of whether a piece was even worth publishing. The output was fast, and most of it was slop. Nothing we'd put our name on.
So instead of a faster writer, we built a newsroom. Topic discovery, a hard source gate, independent quality checks that can hold a piece back, and a named editor of record on every article. Then we ran it somewhere it couldn't hide: our own portfolio of real publications - general news, finance, lifestyle, local editions in five languages, on live domains.
The engine was refined across more than 20,000 published articles that way - tested and corrected against real readers and real search results long before anyone else could sign up. The failures that only surface in the thousands are the ones that shaped it.
Eventually other site owners started asking if they could use it. Mastheads is that: the same engine, the same quality gates, the same bylines, configured for your niche, your voice, and your site.
What Mastheads is - and isn't. Mastheads is an autonomous AI newsroom: software that researches, writes, fact-checks, and publishes articles to your own site - WordPress or Ghost - under real named bylines. It isn't a news-reading or briefing app, and it isn't a content-marketing agency. It's the newsroom that produces and runs your publication.
Writing was never the hard part of publishing. Choosing what to write, checking the facts, staying consistent across every site, publishing on schedule — that was the hard part. That's what a newsroom does. That's what Mastheads is: a newsroom that runs itself, but answers to you.
A human is responsible for what ships.
Every Mastheads publication has a named editor of record with final say on editorial standards, source policy, and dispute resolution. Customers name their own editor of record at onboarding, credited on every article their site publishes.
How we think about editorial work.
Real bylines, always
Every article ships with a named human editor of record. Bylines map to a real editorial team configuration in your dashboard.
Sources are cited or the article is dropped
Source-thin topics do not get articles. We would rather publish less than fabricate. Quality gates enforce this at scale.
No paywall scraping, ever
We target publicly accessible content, skip known paywalled and aggregator domains, and operate at low volume. We do not deliberately defeat paywalls.
Customer owns content outright
Articles publish into your site and belong to you. No royalty, no licensing, no attribution back to Mastheads required.
Transparency on the engine
Every article carries an authenticity trace in your dashboard — the sources it used, the checks it passed, and the named byline behind it.