We’re the sidekick. You’re the hero.
We’re not a publisher. We’re not a CMS. We’re not another compliance console built for box-ticking.
Writers’ Bloc exists for independent media — and for the kind of journalism that still keeps people up at night. You know your readers and your field better than anyone. You fight the dragon and rescue the princess. We make sure you’re equipped with a sharp sword and a sturdy shield.
(WE’RE NOT YOUR AVERAGE BEAR, BOO-BOO.)
We started this by accident.
I started Writers’ Bloc because I thought it would be easy. Seriously.
I could not have been more wrong.
I was building something else entirely — a different idea in media — and it wasn’t working. But while it quietly failed, I kept talking to the people in the trade: editors, authors, journalists, the publishers of the trade journals and specialist magazines nobody writes profiles about, but whose work drives all sorts of industries. Three years and more than 450 conversations later, they were all describing the same painful problem.
Their work was turning up everywhere — across the web, and now inside AI answers and output — with no attribution, no permission, no payment. And they were blind to it. No way to see who was taking it. No way to claw back a penny when they did. No way to even clock the new swarm of bots and crawlers arriving at every site to copy the content without permission, and swan off without paying.
So I changed tack. This was a problem worth solving, and big enough to build a company around.
We’ve seen this film before.
Music had its version in the Napster years. Everyone agreed the industry was finished. Then Steve Jobs built iTunes, and Daniel Ek built Spotify — both on the same stubborn bet: you don’t beat piracy by dragging it through the courts. You beat it by building something so much better that paying becomes the obvious thing to do.
Journalism and publishing are having that exact moment now, and AI is the new Napster. We intend to be what comes after — something better than theft, that pays the people who did the work, and still hands the AI companies, the readers, and everyone downstream something far simpler and cleaner than what they’ve got today.
“But isn’t journalism dying?”
After 1945, Japan looked like a country with nothing left. Akio Morita founded Sony in the burnt-out shell of a department store — not chasing reward or recognition, just rebuilding, for the people around him. You know how that turned out.
Today, Japan is one of the biggest and most important economies in the world.
Sony is one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world.
We take our cue from founders like that.
Industries don’t die because the work stops mattering. They die when nobody builds the thing that carries them into the next era.
We’re building that thing.
Commandments we live by.
Bullshit not.
Plain talk, always. No spin, no hype, no fine print written to trip you up.
Honour thy neighbour’s archive.
Your work is yours. We treat everyone else’s exactly the same way — provenance first, permission always.
Bow not to AI’s false idols, nor to content thieves.
We don’t worship the machine, and we don’t excuse the theft. We build something better. Simple.
You write. We handle the rest.
Building a great publication is meant to be about delivering great journalism: telling stories that resonate, speaking truth to power, delighting readers who genuinely care — and, yes, getting paid for the value sitting in your archive. Because if you don’t value your work, who will?
The rest — policing who’s using your work, chasing permissions and payments, the hours lost to anything that isn’t writing or readers — shouldn’t be your problem.
That part is ours.
Who’s behind the curtain.
Small team, sharp tools, and two seats still warm. If the rules above sound like yours, we should talk.
John Byrne
The man behind the curtain — or, on the org chart, Chief Bottle-Washer. Close to a decade combined in sales, corporate M&A, and media rights before this; 450+ conversations into it now, no turning back. Started Writers’ Bloc because he thought it would be easy. (It was not.)
Guardian of the Code
Wanted: someone who loves solving hard problems and building cool stuff in equal measure. You’ll own the engine that fingerprints, tracks and attributes the world’s writing.
Seanchaí-in-Chief
Wanted: a storyteller’s storyteller. We’re an Irish company, and storytelling is a hugely important part of Irish culture, going back 5,000 years to the days of the Celts. Seanchaí means ‘official storyteller’ in Irish — the keeper of the tale, the one who makes the industry believe.
Independent media deserves a sidekick. We’re building it.
Provenance, attribution and fair pay for everyone who writes online. Be early, or build it with us.
BUILT ON 450+ CONVERSATIONS WITH THE INDUSTRY