The full engine, none of the keys
A recurring reaction, when I show people Mastheads, goes something like this: I like it, but I am not giving any AI tool the keys to my website. And every time, my honest response is: good. That instinct is healthy. Publish access is a real thing to hand over, and "trust me" is not a good enough reason to hand it.
So the product has a mode for exactly that person.
The newsroom that stops at the draft
Draft-only mode runs the entire newsroom - scouting the topics worth covering, drafting in your voice under a named byline, fact-checking, quality gates, on-topic images - and then it stops at the finished draft. There is no CMS connected. Nothing publishes anywhere. You read the drafts in your dashboard, edit whatever you want, and when you are ready, you export them: WordPress WXR, Ghost JSON, Markdown, or HTML, with all the images. Then you put them live yourself, wherever and whenever you choose.
Everything that makes the output good is still there - the same quality gates that can hold a piece back, the same named bylines, the same five languages. The only thing missing is the part you did not want to give: access to your site.
Missing on purpose
This is deliberate all the way down. A draft-only edition can never be switched to auto-publish. The whole promise is that it cannot touch your website, so the option to make it do so does not exist. That is a different kind of guarantee than a setting you have to remember to leave off - there is no toggle to flip by accident, no permission that quietly widens later.
The rest of the product works the same way: autonomy always answers to you, and your content is always yours to take. Draft-only just moves the line further in your direction - the machine does the work, and the last step belongs to you by construction.
A lower-stakes way to start
It turns out this is also just an easier way to try the thing. Trying a tool is easy when the worst case is a few drafts you do not use, and there is no way for it to surprise you by publishing something. If the drafts are good, you will know within a week - you read them, you edited them, you published the ones you liked, on your own site, with your own hands.
And if at some point you decide the newsroom has earned the keys, that is a choice you make then, with evidence. Until then: the full engine, none of the keys.