Masthead CMS Schedule a migration audit

For ambitious local newsrooms

The CMS built for the next generation of local news.

Masthead CMS gives local publishers the publishing power of WordPress, the workflow depth of Arc XP, and the speed of a custom Astro site without enterprise bloat.

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  • Astro static-first
  • Cloudflare edge hosting
  • R2-ready media
  • Reference: TiffinOhio.net

Core positioning

Speed, flexibility, revenue tools, and migration support in one publishing platform.

Masthead CMS is not another news site. It is a premium publishing platform for local newsrooms that need modern delivery and newsroom-specific tools without rebuilding everything from scratch.

Astro speed, CMS control

Static-first delivery, Cloudflare edge hosting, optimized images, and clean front-end output without forcing teams back into legacy CMS themes.

Newsroom workflow depth

Authors, revisions, templates, SEO previews, canonical/source fields, assignments, approvals, and breaking-news-ready editorial metadata.

Revenue and growth tools

Newsletter gates, donation CTAs, ad slots, sponsored content labels, subscriptions, native modules, audience follows, and campaign landing pages.

Platform

Everything a local newsroom needs to publish, grow, and monetize faster.

The base site is structured around the CMS product story: performance, publishing workflows, audience growth, migration, SEO, and revenue operations.

Performance

Built for Core Web Vitals from day one

  • Astro-powered static-first architecture
  • Cloudflare Pages with serverless functions
  • Sharp image optimization with WebP, AVIF, responsive widths, and lazy loading
  • R2-ready media workflow to reduce deploy size
  • Pagefind static search indexing

Publishing

A CMS shaped around local newsroom work

  • Custom editor for posts, pages, authors, media, slugs, frontmatter, and revisions
  • Multi-author profiles with bios, headshots, titles, organizations, email, and social links
  • Story templates, key points, developing labels, featured content, categories, and tags
  • Republishing fields, partner source metadata, and canonical attribution
  • AI-assisted headlines, summaries, tags, SEO titles, social posts, and newsletter blurbs

Audience

Growth tools baked into the publishing system

  • Newsletter acquisition across homepage CTAs, article gates, exit intent, nav modals, and category follows
  • Spam protection with honeypots, disposable email checks, verification, canonicalized email, and rate limits
  • Social previews, RSS, sitemap indexes, Google News sitemap, and structured article schema
  • Reader engagement modules for weather, games, guides, civic tools, podcasts, and video
  • PostHog, Microsoft Clarity, and Marfeel integration hooks

Migration

Move without losing the history that matters

  • WordPress, Ghost, Arc XP, RSS, XML, SQL, and markdown archive migration paths
  • Redirect preservation for old story URLs and search equity
  • Image migration with captions, credits, dimensions, alt text, focal points, and CDN-ready formats
  • Import/export, webhooks, and API-first delivery for custom integrations
  • Multi-site publishing for groups operating several local news brands

Growth and revenue

Designed for the business model local publishers actually run.

Masthead CMS packages newsletter growth, reader engagement, sponsorship inventory, donation prompts, subscription options, and local utility modules into a cohesive publishing system.

Audience acquisition

Newsletter gates, category follows, author follows, referral tracking, and campaign landing pages.

Revenue surfaces

Ad slots, donation CTAs, sponsored labels, native modules, subscription paths, and premium content gates.

Local utility

Elections, weather, events, restaurants, sports scores, public records, civic info, podcasts, and video.

Migration promise

Bring every story, image, author, tag, redirect, and subscriber with you.

Move from WordPress, Ghost, Arc XP, RSS, XML, SQL, or markdown archives while preserving search equity, media metadata, canonical attribution, and subscriber context.

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Pricing

Pricing shaped around your newsroom, migration, and growth plan.

Masthead CMS is scoped with each publisher so pricing reflects your archive size, migration path, brand requirements, revenue tools, and launch timeline.

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  • CMS implementation and launch planning
  • Migration audit for archives, media, authors, tags, and redirects
  • Cloudflare hosting, R2 media workflow, and performance setup
  • Revenue, newsletter, SEO, analytics, and local utility modules
  • Optional multi-site and custom integration planning

Comparison

Masthead vs WordPress vs enterprise CMS platforms.

The product is positioned between plugin-heavy general CMS stacks and enterprise newsroom platforms that are often too costly or rigid for local publishers.

Need
Masthead CMS
WordPress
Arc XP-style enterprise
Performance
Static-first Astro delivery on Cloudflare
Theme and plugin stack often needs heavy optimization
Powerful, but frequently slower and complex to customize
Newsroom fit
Local-news workflows, utilities, revenue tools, and SEO built in
Flexible, but assembled from plugins and custom work
Deep workflows with enterprise overhead
Migration
Preserves stories, authors, images, tags, redirects, and subscribers
Good importer ecosystem, uneven cleanup
Often requires expensive implementation partners
Ownership
Modern front end, open delivery model, Cloudflare resilience
Broad ecosystem with ongoing maintenance burden
Vendor lock-in and long release cycles