Headline is a free, open-source Ghost theme built for local news sites that automatically surfaces the topics you write about most while letting publishers manually pin their top coverage areas.
What is Headline?
Headline is a Ghost theme created by the Ghost Foundation and developed in the TryGhost/Themes monorepo, where official Ghost themes are maintained. It takes your Ghost site's content as input and renders a front-end designed to display large amounts of articles across multiple coverage areas. The theme runs on the Ghost publishing platform and is released under the MIT license. A live demo is available at https://headline.ghost.io.
What makes Headline stand out?
- Adaptive topic display — Headline automatically showcases your most written about topics, or lets you manually control which topics are front and center.
- Local news focus — Built from the ground up for local news, with a layout intended to handle high article volumes and varied coverage sections.
- Ghost-native integration — Installs directly through Ghost's Design settings by uploading the theme ZIP file; no external CMS or database setup required.
- PostCSS build pipeline — Styles are compiled with Gulp and PostCSS to polyfill future CSS specs, giving you modern CSS authoring in the theme's asset files.
- Translation-ready — Theme translations are contributed through the TryGhost/Themes repository's theme-translations README, allowing community localization.
- Open source license — Released under the MIT license, so you can freely use, modify, and redistribute the theme.
- Downloadable archive — The theme is available as a ZIP download from the GitHub repository for easy installation.
Who should use Headline?
- Local news publishers — Set up a news website on Ghost that can showcase many stories organized by topic and coverage area.
- Community journalists and editors — Use the manual topic selection to keep specific local beats visible on the homepage.
- Ghost site owners — Deploy a theme designed for content-heavy sites, with minimal configuration beyond uploading the ZIP in Design settings.
- Independent newsrooms — Publish on a free, open-source theme with MIT licensing, avoiding proprietary theme fees.
Use cases
- Local newsrooms: publish daily articles across beats such as city hall, schools, and sports, and let Headline automatically highlight the topics you've covered most.
- Editors: manually pin the front-and-center topics to prioritize important coverage regardless of posting frequency.
- News bloggers: use the same theme for a personal news site or niche publication, since Headline works for any purpose even though it is designed for local news.
How does Headline work?
To use Headline, download the theme ZIP from the GitHub repository (or clone the repo), then log into your Ghost admin panel, open the Design settings, and upload the ZIP file. Ghost activates the theme immediately. For development, install Node, pnpm, and Gulp globally, run pnpm install from the theme's root directory, and use pnpm dev to build and watch CSS changes; the zip Gulp task packages the theme into dist/headline.zip for upload.
FAQ
Is Headline free?
Yes, Headline is released under the MIT license, so it is free to use, modify, and distribute. The source code is publicly available in the TryGhost/Headline repository, which syncs with the TryGhost/Themes monorepo.
What platform does Headline run on?
Headline is a Ghost theme, so it runs on the Ghost publishing platform. It is not a standalone static site generator or a framework theme; you need a Ghost site to use it.
How do I install Headline?
Download the theme archive from the GitHub repository, log into Ghost, go to the Design settings area, and upload the ZIP file. The theme will be applied immediately.
Does Headline require any external dependencies?
For end users, no. The theme runs on Ghost out of the box. Development requires Node, pnpm, and Gulp to build the CSS, but these are only needed if you want to modify the theme's assets.
Can I use Headline for non-news websites?
Yes, the theme can be used for any purpose. While it is designed specifically for local news and heavy content display, its adaptable topic layout works for other content-heavy publications.
