Masthead

Masthead 1.0.0 — free and open source Türkiye · United States · India · United Kingdom · Germany · Brazil · France

Every major newsroom in your country, on one calm front page.

Masthead is a desktop news reader. It gathers 955 newsrooms into one quiet, magazine-like front page — and every story opens inside the app, with ads and trackers blocked. No account, no telemetry, nothing to sign in to.

Get it from Microsoft Download Masthead See how it reads

Windows · macOS · Linux — and it runs in your browser too.

Masthead's front page: a breaking-news bar, a top story covered by 16 sources, and a live timeline of the latest headlines

Read in place

Read the news, not the ads.

Click a story and it opens in a dialog inside Masthead — in Reader mode by default: the article as text, in your own reading font. Press Esc and you are back on the front page.

  • The publisher's page is one click away in the same dialog, with EasyList-based ad and tracker blocking switched on.
  • No pop-ups, no downloads. Pop-ups, downloads and permission prompts from news pages are refused, and the embedded browser runs in its own sandboxed session.
  • Your call. Switch between Reader and Web in the toolbar at any time, or make Web the default in Settings → Reading.
Reader mode showing a Frankfurter Allgemeine article as plain text with a photograph, in a German interface
Reader mode on a German article — two minutes' reading, nothing else on the page.

One story, every outlet

See who reported what, without opening a tab.

The same event is rarely told the same way twice. Masthead clusters what different newsrooms publish about one event, so you can read around a story instead of through a single outlet.

  • On the front page, the top story says how many outlets are covering it — and lists their headlines.
  • The Digest is that idea end to end: one card per event, the fullest summary, every outlet's own headline underneath.
  • Inside an article, “Also covered by” takes you from one newsroom's version to another's in a click.
The Digest page: one card per story with the headline of every outlet that covered it
The Digest — each story once, with every outlet's headline below it.

Seven countries

Seven countries. Six interface languages.

Each country ships a curated, politically balanced pack — public broadcasters, news agencies, mainstream papers, independent media, plus business, sport, technology, health and culture titles and the country's local press. Every outlet writes in the country's own language; the interface language is yours to pick.

Scroll the strip sideways. More countries are on the way.

The rest of it

Everything else it does.

Breaking news

A ticker across the front page, a page of its own, and optional desktop notifications.

Local news

Pick your city, state, Bundesland or area — in every country — for its own papers and broadcasters and every story that names it.

Filters and search

Time range, sources, topics, region, most-covered sort, images only, hide read — and search that ignores accents.

Your sources

Switch any outlet on or off. Switched-off sources are never fetched, and feed health is on the Sources page.

Library

Saved stories and reading history, stored on your machine and nowhere else.

Make it yours

Light, dark or system; five accent colours; twelve bundled reading fonts; text size and a compact mode.

Markets

Your watchlist of currencies, gold, crypto and companies, prices every minute and each one's news, with the markets wire filling in live.

For you

Your interests, your city and what you have been reading — learned on your computer — and every card says why it is there.

Every outlet's take

A page for each widely covered story: who reported it first and how every outlet headlined it.

Keyboard first

Ctrl/⌘+K to go anywhere; J and K to move through stories, O to open, S to save.

Muted words

Stories that mention them disappear from every page and from notifications.

Up to date by itself

New versions download in the background; one click restarts into them.

Download

Get Masthead 1.0.0

Free, MIT licensed, no account. Every build is produced in the open by GitHub Actions and published on the Releases page.

Windows

macOS

Linux

All downloads on GitHub What's new in 1.0.0

Install once. Windows updates the Microsoft Store version by itself. The Windows installer and the Linux AppImage keep themselves up to date too: they download new versions in the background and ask you to restart. The portable, macOS and .deb builds tell you when a new version is out.

The files on GitHub are not code-signed yet (the Microsoft Store version is signed by Microsoft). Windows SmartScreen may warn on first launch — choose More info → Run anyway. On macOS, the first start is refused: choose Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Can't install software? The whole app also runs in a normal browser, on your own machine, from source: git clone, npm install, npm run dev:web.

Private by design

No account. No telemetry. Not even on this page.

Masthead has no sign-up and no analytics. Your settings, saved stories and reading history stay in a folder on your computer. The app connects to the news sites you enable, to fetch the stories and their pictures, to GitHub once an hour to see whether a new version is out — and, if ad blocking is on, to download the public filter lists. The Markets page asks free public price services while it is open, and the weather card (off unless you switch it on) sends Open-Meteo your city. Nothing else.

This page is the same: no cookies, no analytics, no third-party requests. The fonts are served from here, not from a font CDN.

Publishers: Masthead has no server — it reads the RSS feeds you publish on each reader's own computer, credits and links your outlet on every story, and leaves subscriber-only articles on your site. If you would rather your outlet were not included, tell us and it will be out of the next release.