A wave of news publishers have arrived on Bluesky in recent days, following audiences and journalists departing X/Twitter.

Days after announcing it was leaving X, The Guardian has become one of a flurry of news publishers to set up an account on the rival microblogging platform.

A significant uptick in account registrations since the US election has prompted a wave of new journalists and publishers to start posting to Bluesky over the past week. As of midday Tuesday it had 20 million accounts, up from 16 million before the weekend.

There has been a gradual flow of users from X toward rival platforms since Elon Musk bought the network in October 2022, but the influx has accelerated since the tech entrepreneur became closely involved with Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and then his fledgling second administration. Meta platform Threads, which has signalled an intent not to get entangled with the news industry, appears not to have benefitted from the exodus in the same way as Bluesky.

Publications including The Economist, The Week, the i, Kent Online and ITV News have joined Bluesky in the past week, and previously dormant accounts from the likes of Politico, Semafor, The Lead, Tortoise and Pink News have resumed activity. The National Union of Journalists has also set up, as well as press regulator IPSO.

All of the above have either verified they are official accounts by making their handle their website address, or Press Gazette has confirmed they are official with the publishers themselves.

Although the publications appear to have been joined by numerous big names in journalism, including BBC presenter Matt Chorley and Guardian editor Katharine Viner, few of them have verified their identities. One who has is Sky News lead politics presenter Sophy Ridge, who observed that she appears to be getting more engagement on Bluesky than on X despite having a far smaller following.

Charlie Baker, editor of quarterly print magazine The Fence, agreed that Bluesky engagement has been good, telling Press Gazette: “The Fence got 4,000 followers over the weekend, and we’re enjoying a very high level of engagement. It’s a lot of fun and long may that continue.”

Josh Billinson, the senior social media editor at Semafor, posted on Monday that he had recommenced the publisher’s activity on Bluesky a week earlier “and it already has more followers than the Threads account I’ve been posting to consistently for over a year”.

Where is news publisher Bluesky follower growth coming from?

Bluesky does not include algorithmic recommendations as a standard feature of user timelines. As a result, so-called starter packs — lists created by users of accounts, usually grouped around a single theme and who can all be followed at a single click — have been the leading driver of rapid account growth.

Freelance Chaminda Jayanetti wrote last week that “with warp speed I now have more followers here than on Twitter, which (genuinely) has very little to do with my posts here but really shows the effect of starter packs”.

Getting into a widely-used starter pack in the first place can be another matter, however. Several news organisations have been creating their own, allowing users to follow all of their journalists at once, and a third-party Bluesky directory makes it possible to search for packs on specific themes.

As well as the starter packs, Press Gazette has written previously about a feed containing posts from verified news providers which is maintained by Financial Times data journalism engineer Ændra Rininsland. She said on Monday the feed was receiving one million requests a day. Only news outlets that have linked their handle to their domain name may apply for inclusion in the feed.

[Read more: Twitter alternative? News publishers see potential in Bluesky]

Journalists sign open letter declaring X/Twitter ‘no longer a useful tool’ for reporting

In the past week a group of more than 30 journalists ut their names to an open letter declaring X to be “no longer a useful tool” for reporting.

The signatories include Guardian North of England correspondent Robyn Vinter, investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan, Foreign Press Association London director Deborah Bonetti and former Guardian special correspondent Nick Davies.

The letter, organised by Byline Times chief reporter Josiah Mortimer, said Twitter “played an important role in shaping many of our careers” and that “it was, for a long time, the place to be for UK politics”.

But, it added, “we believe that time is over now”.

The Elon Musk-owned platform has long been a useful way for journalists to find stories, verify information and contact sources, as well as to distribute their work and meet peers.

However the signatories argued that under Musk “feeds have become less useful. Engagement has plummeted, except for those who will pay. Replies gain traction not through merit, but through the corrupted blue-tick system.

“We have seen hate speech and abuse deliberately dialled up and amplified, boosted not just by the algorithm, but by the owner himself… It is no longer a useful tool for objective reporting, but a weapon being wielded by a narrowing ideological set.”

The letter adds that in lieu of X, “we are all putting the majority of our efforts into building more constructive online spaces elsewhere”, in particular Bluesky.

The letter and the full list of signatories can be viewed here.

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Just over a fifth of US adults now regularly get news from influencers on social media, a new Pew-Knight Initiative survey has found.

An analysis of who those influencers are indicated few of the most popular accounts for news online have ever formally worked in journalism and that they are more likely to lean right than left.

The findings come as the US media grapples with the result of the the 2024 presidential election and what it means for the reach and influence of professional journalism.

The survey, published on Monday, canvassed 10,658 US adults this summer and was weighted to be demographically representative of the US population.

Of those surveyed, 21% said they “regularly” get news from influencers. That figure rose to 37% among US adults aged 29 and below and 26% among those between 30 and 49.

Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans were more likely than the average US adult to regularly get news from influencers, at 27%, 30% and 29% respectively. Lower income Americans (26%) were the most likely socioeconomic bracket to get news this way and women (23%) were more likely to do so than men (19%).

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans who said they got news from news influencers rated the content positively, saying it “helped them better understand current events and civic issues”.

About a quarter said it made little difference to their understanding of the world while 9% said it made them “more confused”. About six in ten (58%) said they follow or subscribe to at least one news influencer.

There was little difference between right-leaning (21%) and left-leaning (22%) people in how likely they were to get news from social media influencers – even though the influencers themselves were more likely to create right-leaning content.

[Read more: From James O’Brien to Joe Rogan — Rise of news influencers and alternative voices]

Top US news influencers are mostly male and lean right

As well as the survey, the Pew researchers looked at a sample of 500 “news influencers”, defined as individuals who had used news-related keywords in early 2024 who had a minimum of 100,000 followers. across X (formerly Twitter), Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok or Facebook.

Figures captured within the research included the likes of podcasters Joe Rogan and Felix Biederman, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, psychologist and Trump family member Mary L Trump, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, journalists Piers Morgan, Megyn Kelly and Katie Couric, lawyer Alan Dershowitz and actress Alyssa Milano.

Less than a quarter (23%) of the news influencers sampled had ever worked for a news organisation. On X (formerly Twitter) the proportion of news influencers with ties to a news organisation rose to 26%, whereas on Youtube it fell to 12%.

Most of the 500 news influencers did not self-identify as right or left. Of those that did, 27% explicitly identified as Republican, conservative or supportive of Donald Trump and 21% as Democrats, liberal or Kamala Harris supporters.

The influencers who had worked in news were less likely to explicitly disclose a political orientation (with 64% staying unaligned, versus 44% of those without a traditional news affiliation), but those who did articulate a position were more likely to be right-leaning (25%) than left (9%).

Instagram was the most explicitly political platform for news influencers, with 55% of the creators there disclosing an orientation (30% right, 25% left). Although Facebook had a higher proportion of ostensibly unaligned news influencers, it also had the biggest proportion of right-leaning news influencers (39%, compared with 13% who were left-leaning).

Tiktok was the most left-leaning platform, with 28% of news influencers explicitly identifying themselves as left-leaning compared with 25% right-leaning.

Most (63%) of the news influencers assessed were men. Tiktok was the most gender-balanced platform, with 50% of the news influencers there men and 45% women. Youtube was the least balanced: 68% of the news influencers on the video platform were men versus 28% women.

X was the most used platform among news influencers, with 85% of the 500 assessed present there. Half had an Instagram account, 44% posted to Youtube, 32% to Facebook, 30% to Threads, 27% to Tiktok and 12% to Linkedin.

Of the 500 news influencers, 59% were monetising their presence. The most common way of doing this was through subscriptions (49%), with 29% accepting donations and 21% selling merchandise. The proportion monetising their accounts rose to 74% on Tiktok, 77% on Facebook and 80% on Youtube.

A third (34%) of the influencers also host a podcast and 22% have a newsletter.

The Pew research incorporated ChatGPT into its methodology. The chatbot was handed text and transcribed audio from the influencer accounts and asked to analyse the content to determine whether the influencers identified themselves, for example, as left or right. A human researcher then spot-checked 1% of the results to check they were accurate, and the error rate was included in the research.

The post Fifth of Americans regularly get news from social media influencers appeared first on Press Gazette.

Essex Police has said it is investigating Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson under a possible breach of the Public Order Act over a year-old, now-deleted post on X.

The force has faced criticism that its tactics amounted to an attack on press freedom after officers visited Pearson at home on Remembrance Sunday. She said she was told officers could not tell her what the offending post was or who had made the complaint against her and was asked to attend a police station for a voluntary interview.

[Read more: Essex Police action against Allison Pearson is misguided and chills press freedom, writes media law expert David Banks]

But the force since said it has complained to press regulator the Independent Press Standards Organisation, claiming Pearson’s original claim in the Telegraph last week that she was visited over a “non-crime hate incident” was inaccurate.

On Saturday morning, 16 November, the force said it had shared a transcript of video footage with IPSO which includes an officer saying: “It’s gone down as an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online. That would be the offence.”

The force said: “A complaint of a possible criminal offence was made to the police and this is why we called; to arrange an interview”.

The Guardian reported on Friday that it had found the deleted message at the centre of the complaint and has spoken anonymously to the person who appears to be behind the Allison Pearson complaint.

Pearson is alleged to have re-posted a picture showing two police officers standing next to a group of people holding a flag associated with a mainstream Pakistani political party.

A deleted message, retrieved from online archives by Press Gazette, sent by Pearson on 16 November 2023 said: “How dare they @metpoliceuk. Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”

The message was viewed more than 400,000 times according to X. Context added to the message by other X users noted that the picture appeared to be from a protest which took place in August 2023 in Mancheseter relating to a Pakistani political party and said the event had no relation to Palestine, Israel or Hamas.

The complainant is not one of the people in the photograph. The person told The Guardian: “Each time an influential person makes negative comments about people of colour I, as a person of colour, see an uptick in racist abuse towards me and the days after that tweet are no different.”

Press Gazette reproduces the excerpt from the website archive.is below. The image has been altered by Press Gazette to obscure the faces of those appearing in it.

What is the Public Order Act and how can journalists breach it?

For an offence to be a committed under the Public Order Act 1986 the language used must be “threatening, abusive or insulting” and “intended to or likely in all the circumstances to stir up racial hatred”.

Journalists can fall foul of the act when reporting on extreme political statements.

Crown Prosecution Service guidance states: “In deciding upon the public interest of charging these offences it is essential that prosecutors keep in mind that in a free, democratic, and tolerant society people are able to robustly exchange views, even when these may cause offence. However, the rights of the individual to freedom of expression must be balanced against the duty of the state to act proportionately in the interests of public safety, to prevent disorder and crime, and to protect the rights of others.”

What does Allison Pearson have to say?

Writing on X on Saturday, in a post which has been viewed more than three million times, Pearson said:

“The story so far.

“1. I am not a racist.

“2. I didn’t post a racist tweet.

“3. My tweet did not incite violence against any protected characteristic.

“4. My fairly innocuous tweet was deleted a year ago.

“5. Senior lawyers say my tweet does ‘not come near the threshold for criminal prosecution’.

“6. But Essex Police upgraded the accusation from Non-Crime Hate Incident to offence under the Public order Act. Why?

“7. Essex Police visited my home but refused to specify either the accusation or the accuser.

“8. Under pressure, Essex Police deployed the terrorist-fighting Gold Command to investigate a solitary Welsh journalist 5ft 4 inches who still believes in freedom of speech. Weird, I know.

“9. This is all nonsense. Deeply sinister, frightening nonsense and wholly disproportionate police over-reach if you ask me.

“10. Last night, I realised I no longer feel safe in my own country.

“A terrible moment. As Elon Musk said, ‘This must stop.’ It really must.”

Non-crime hate incidents

Feminist Julie Bindel, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, said she was also visited by police on a Sunday over an allegation of committing a “hate crime” over a message she had posted on X. She said she was given no further details and asked to attend a police station voluntarily to make a statement. Bindel refused and said she was told the investigation was being dropped.

Police forces around the UK are believed to be keeping records of thousands of “non-crime hate incidents” which are often based on social media posts and occur when no criminal offence has been committed but when a complainant believes a statement was motivated by hostility or prejudice.

Telegraph calls for change in the law

In a leader column The Sunday Telegraph warned that “overzealous police officers” are “choosing to focus their effort on policing thoughts and speech rather than cracking down on violent crime or theft”.

It said: “Many overseas are watching, and appear horrified that in a supposedly free and democratic society journalists and politicians can face criminal investigation for expressing strongly worded opinions…

“Until we get a government willing to change the law, a small minority of activists will retain the ability to comb wording for offence and abuse police procedure as a means to intimidate opponents.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer was asked about the Pearson case yesterday. He said: “There is a review going on of this particular aspect but I think that as a general principle the police should concentrate on what matters most to their communities.”

The post Telegraph calls for change in law after Allison Pearson accused of Public Order offence appeared first on Press Gazette.

The Guardian is to stop posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, from its official accounts, editor-in-chief Katharine Viner has told staff.

Viner said in an email on Wednesday that X has become “a toxic media platform” under owner Elon Musk and that it now plays “a diminished role in promoting our work”.

Individual journalists are still permitted to post on the platform and to use it as a reporting tool, Viner added, but she discouraged staff from embedding tweets in articles “unless necessary to the story” because the platform has become “less stable and less useful as an experience for our readers”.

The Guardian and Observer operate more than 40 active X accounts, collectively boasting more than 20 million followers. Of those accounts, 13 are verified.

Besides a post announcing its departure, the last tweet The Guardian posted to its main account at 7.15am on Wednesday promoted an article about tropical birdwatching.

The account’s bio now states: “This account has been archived. Follow us on https://theguardian.com or download our app.”

Viner told staff the move was “something we have been thinking about for a while, given the often disturbing content promoted on the platform.

“The presidential election campaign only served to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”

Although social media “can be an important tool” for reaching new audiences, Viner said the organisation feels “that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.

“We believe resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.”

Among respondents surveyed for the Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism this year, 11% said they had used X/Twitter for news over the preceding week. That was lower than the proportion who said they had gotten news from Instagram (15%), Whatsapp (16%), Youtube (22%) and Facebook (26%), but more than Tiktok (8%).

NPR became the first major English-language news outlet to leave X in protest at Musk’s ownership in April 2023, followed by fellow public broadcaster PBS two days later. NPR told staff in a memo seen by Nieman Lab six months later that the traffic effects had been “negligible”.

The Guardian maintains an active presence on Meta’s Instagram-linked Threads, where its main account has 1.3 million followers. The Guardian is yet to set up a central profile on rival platform Bluesky, but Guardian Australia has an account.

The Guardian regularly posts to Facebook (where it has 8.9 million followers) and Instagram (where it has 5.8 million followers).

[Read more: Twitter’s shrinking role as traffic source for news publishers revealed]

The post The Guardian departs ‘toxic media platform’ Twitter/X appeared first on Press Gazette.

Leading LGBTQ+ publisher Pink News says it is considering legal action against a “whistleblower” Twitter account devoted to publishing criticism of the way the brand is run.

The account, Pink News Whistleblowers, has garnered thousands of retweets and more than 6,000 followers for posts which have included leaked recordings from what appear to be high-level company meetings. Last week the account disappeared from Twitter.

Lawyers acting for the business have advised Press Gazette that the account “is the subject of potential litigation” and cautioned that “any reliance” on the account’s posts “would involve a degree of legal jeopardy”.

However, Press Gazette’s own research suggests several former staffers sympathise with the concerns raised by Pink News Whistleblower account.

Press Gazette has been unable to verify the identity of the person or people running the Pink News Whistleblower account itself, but we have spoken to 12 verified current and former staffers of the brand.

Most of the sources said working at Pink News left them feeling stressed, anxious and overworked.

“If I knew who it was I would shake their hand,” said one former employee, saying the account had “given a lot of colleagues the courage to speak up”. Like almost all the people Press Gazette interviewed, the person agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity.

Another former employee said: “When I heard some of the stories coming out it opened that box again for me, and I thought: ‘God, that was a really awful time, wasn’t it?”

‘This was beyond the pale’

The people Press Gazette spoke with worked at Pink News for a variety of periods across the past decade. We were referred to several of them by the Pink News Whistleblower account itself, but approached or were approached by other sources directly. Most held editorial roles, with a handful having been commercial staff.

One former employee said. “It was the most damaging place for me, mentally, that I’ve been.

“I’ve been in multiple workplaces, I’ve been in multiple newsrooms. This was beyond the pale. We were constantly on edge.”

They said: “When you’re doing something which feels good for the world, like writing about queer issues… you’re willing to put up with online hostility. Usually that comes from comments on social media – hatred from politicians as well, God.” But they said they felt unsupported within the company as well.

“It is hard to speak out, partly because it’s easy to be like: ‘Well, that’s just being a journalist.’ You’re not treated well all the time, necessarily. It’s easy to make excuses for people and to wonder if you’re just not tough enough to be in the industry.”

A second former staffer made similar comments, saying their well-being while at the company had been “not good” due to the way they felt they were treated.

They added: “A lot of it was brushed aside for a long period of time – people saying that’s newsroom culture. But actually, on so many levels, it went beyond that.”

And they said: “Every employer I’ve worked for since, I have not had similar problems anywhere. And as much as newsroom culture can be a changeable thing, I’ve never experienced what I experienced at Pink News anywhere else.”

A third former employee said “there was so much hostility at work”, saying they had been shouted at in the office.

A fourth described their wellbeing while working at the company as “utterly abysmal”. A fifth said: “There would always be shouting in the office.”

Pink News began as a side hustle for then Channel 4 News technology correspondent Ben Cohen in 2005. Today it is one of the biggest news sources in the world for LBGTQ+ issues. In 2021 it boasted an annual profit of £2m, but the following year it saw a sharp drop advertising revenue derived via social media. As of 2023 Pink News employed 76 staff, but nine roles were put at risk of redundancy at the start of this year.

The most recent accounts, for the year to 31 December 2022, reported profit before tax of £1.5m for Pink News on turnover of £5.5m. That revenue figure was revised down from an earlier number, £10.3m, that was provided to The Sunday Times. The company told Press Gazette previously that the revision reflected a change in the way the company reported income from its revenue-sharing arrangements with third-party platforms.

‘Knocked my confidence’

Adam Bloodworth, who is now deputy life and style editor at City AM, spent approximately six weeks at Pink News as a features editor and was the one former staffer willing to speak to Press Gazette under his own name.

Bloodworth, who came out to his parents in part because he had taken a role at Pink News, said he was given “a hugely challenging task load to complete… I think I had to commission 80 features a month from the get-go”.

He hit that target, he said, but was then laid off for after being told he had failed to hit search engine optimisation goals. Bloodworth described the meeting where he was laid off as “heated”.

The episode “knocked my confidence professionally,” Bloodworth said. “It was a defining moment in my life, really… I still haven’t really processed it.”

One person who has worked at Pink News described “late-night emails and messages” and “a constant pressure to make more and more money”.

Another editorial employee, already quoted above, said they felt: “There were extreme expectations of how much we were meant to produce in a day.”

But it should be noted that current editorial output on Pink News appears to be within UK news industry norms.

In the week commencing 19 August the site published 89 stories authored by 11 named writers, as well as another 17 credited to a generic “Pink News Reporter” byline. Both the mean and median number of stories produced by each reporter over the week was approximately nine, with the most prolific author publishing 18.

‘Consistent problems over nearly a decade’

One former staffer said they were glad when the Pink News Whistleblowers Twitter account appeared.

“I have talked to former Pink News people over many years about crap like this, and nothing is ever really done. So I’m pleased, I’m keen to help them.”

Another said: “Sure, every company has a few disgruntled employees… I don’t believe this is one or two disgruntled employees. This is consistent problems over nearly a decade.”

Another said: “Employees talk. All of us talk to each other. It’s not just one person in this isolated event saying that this happened to them. They have friends and colleagues who are going to be willing to stand behind them and say: ‘No, this happened.’

“People have been sending audio recordings, people have been sending screenshots – how are Pink News going to take legal action and expect to come out on top?”

Asked why it launched its campaign, a source at the Pink News Whistleblowers account said they did not feel Pink News was advocating sufficiently well for “important LGBTQ+ issues, especially the trans community”.

“Recent redundancies of dedicated staff members was the final straw, proving that the company’s senior management prioritises profit over supporting the LGBTQ+ community that has been the backbone of Pink News since its humble beginnings in a small office in North London.”

Not all former staffers agree with Pink News Whistleblower criticism

Not every person Press Gazette asked spoke in favour of the account or its characterisation of either working at Pink News or its output. One independent Pink News source told Press Gazette the testimonies promoted on Twitter had “genuinely not been my experience with either the senior leadership or Ben and Anthony themselves”. Cohen is the CEO of Pink News and his husband Anthony James is the chief operating officer.

The person was critical of the account’s decision to release an audio clip in which Cohen is apparently heard discussing how Pink News should approach campaigning for trans rights.

This person said the clip had been “posted out of context… which in turn saw the Pink News accounts being abused.

“You’d think from our output it would be clear that Pink News isn’t transphobic, that we continue to post trans-focused content on a very regular basis. And the majority of our creative teams are LGBTQ+ people, so the backlash has had quite a negative effect on them.”

In the week preceding the audio’s release the site published 17 articles about trans or nonbinary people or issues, by Press Gazette’s count, accounting for approximately 12% of output and an average of a little over three stories a day.

Those stories included both more traditional hard news about, for example, the deaths and killings of trans women or allegations that a dating app discriminates against trans people, and also several celebrity-based news stories, for example “Queer Eye’s Jonathan van Ness on developing an anal fistula: ‘I grew a second butthole’”.

‘There are and always have been very dedicated journalists who care significantly about LGBT issues’

A recurring theme throughout the conversations with former staff was admiration for the dedication of many staff working at the brand.

One person said: “There are and always have been very dedicated journalists who care significantly about LGBT issues and will do their utmost to make sure that the coverage does what it should in terms of reporting for the LGBT community, no matter what pressures are put upon them.”

Another said: “The general sentiment for a lot of us former employees is that the people that we worked with on a day-to-day basis were so passionate, so talented, really wanting to make a change.”

Pink News: ‘Staff morale impacted by seven-day working and redundancies’

Press Gazette asked Pink News if it would like to respond to both some of the criticisms raised by the Pink News Whistlelower account and by former staff.

Pink News sent the following statement via lawyers WP Tweed and Co:

“As a preliminary point, we note that as of 29 August 2024, the account in question appears to have been deleted. This further underlines the unreliability of the ccount and the allegations it posted.

“We confirm that we are continuing to provide our client advice in relation to potential action against the ccount and it would therefore be inappropriate for us to elaborate further on this point.

“We reiterate that the information it published, including the audio clips, was distorted and stripped of context to present an inaccurate reflection of our client’s business practice and core values.

“Our client is disappointed to hear that current and former employees have reportedly expressed having experienced workplace difficulties. There are many other current and former employees with positive experiences and our client instructs that they are aware that you have contacted some of these individuals.

“Given the nature of these anonymous and generalised complaints, our client is unable to respond to them properly.

“Our client is aware that staff morale was impacted by two key commercial decisions; the reintroduction of 7-day shift patterns, which are common across the news and media industry, and recent redundancies which have been a major part of Press Gazette’s industry coverage this year.

“Pink News is committed to fostering a positive, supportive and enjoyable workplace where employees’ physical and mental health needs are supported.

“While we note your assertion that individuals you have spoken to expressed support for the account’s description of an unhealthy or unpleasant work environment, this should not be conflated with the account’s severe and unfounded allegations…”

The statement said that some of the content on the Pink News Whistleblowers account was “grossly defamatory” and the law firm said “they are currently considering their position in this regard”.

The post Former staff voice support for Pink News ‘whistleblower’ account threatened with lawsuit appeared first on Press Gazette.

Microblogging platform Bluesky may still be a relative minnow among the social media giants, but several news publishers appear to see potential in it as an alternative to Twitter/X.

Bluesky says it has 1.8 million monthly active users – far short of the 200 million monthly active users claimed by Meta’s product Threads and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which was reported in March to have 174 million active users every day.

But numerous publishers post daily to Bluesky, varying in size and reach from commercial powerhouses like The New York Times and CNN to independent or local titles such as The Intercept and Alaska Beacon.

Press Gazette spoke to publishers using the platform to find out if it might be a possible replacement to X/Twitter, which many see as an increasingly toxic environment populated largely by trolls, extremists and bots.

Click here to Press Gazette’s other Platform Profiles, covering services including Youtube, Snapchat, Whatsapp and more.

What is Bluesky?

From a user’s perspective, Bluesky is a simpler version of X: it presents users with an infinite scrolling feed of short posts (300 characters maximum) from accounts they follow. Users have some control over how they are presented with those posts, but in its most basic form Bluesky gives the user a reverse-chronological feed showing more recent posts first.

The main difference is on the backend. Bluesky is a decentralised, federated platform, which means the accounts you see there can be hosted on different servers. This differs from traditional social media networks where all the accounts and posts would be hosted entirely on, for example, the servers of Facebook or Twitter. The idea is this gives users greater control over their content and audience, allowing them to move to another federated platform without abandoning everything they had built up on the first site.

(Being decentralised has other implications for the platform – for example it is possible, using a free website, to look up who has blocked any given user.)

Another difference is that whereas Threads or X automatically present users with a single feed that is either chronologically or algorithmically ordered, Bluesky allows users to subscribe or create feeds that bring together posts from particular accounts: a user could follow, for example, a news-focused feed, a comedy feed, a fishing-related feed or a feed that surfaces the most recent posts from the least-active accounts they follow.

For now Bluesky lacks some features present on competitors. It added direct messages for the first time in May, and does not yet host video natively. It also lacks post-scheduling capabilities, although third-party services like Buffer are compatible with the platform. Bluesky does not maintain its own post management platform like Twitter’s old Tweetdeck, but another third-party service, deck.blue, is free and functions much the same.

Originally invite-only, Bluesky is now open to whoever wants to join. It has seen a recent influx of users in the UK: a spokesperson for Bluesky told Press Gazette on Tuesday 20 August that it had seen about 36,000 British users join in the preceding two weeks, possibly prompted by concerns that misinformation shared on X helped stoke summer rioting in the UK.

For now at least, Bluesky seems more eager to work with the news industry than some of the social media giants. A spokesperson for the platform, Emily Liu, told Press Gazette: “Newsrooms and journalists are some of the key communities that bring any social platform to life — so many people use social media specifically for news, so we'd love to support newsrooms in making Bluesky home, and are always open to feedback!

“This is a platform where newsrooms can actually own their relationship with their audiences, and thus their distribution.” Liu also has a blog post on the site making the case for how newsrooms can use Bluesky for election coverage."

This attitude may be a tick in its favour compared with the other major possible Twitter successor for news publishers, Threads. The platform's boss, Adam Mosseri, has previously said that while "politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads... we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals".

Mastodon, another decentralised Twitter alternative, does not appear to have taken off among publishers, although it has recently said it wants to become "the go-to place for journalism".

How to succeed on Bluesky

The first step for publishers hoping to set up a trusted, professional presence on Bluesky is to get verified. But Bluesky does not verify accounts in the same way that Twitter once did, and nor does it have a paid verification system like X or Threads do today. Instead, Bluesky allows users to self-verify by setting their web domain as their account handle.

Setting your domain as your handle proves that you really are who you claim to be because it is only possible to do so if you control the domain in question. Making @pressgazette.co.uk your name on Bluesky, for example, would require you to add a particular string of text onto the domain registrar for pressgazette.co.uk. (Bluesky provides a more technical explanation of this process on its website.)

Once verified, publishers can ask to be included on Bluesky’s largest news feed, which can serve as a useful way to reach interested audiences. (Unverified accounts are not eligible for the feed.)

The feed is maintained in a personal capacity by Ændra Rininsland, a senior data journalism engineer at the Financial Times.

Asked how she thought publishers could do well on Bluesky, Rininsland told Press Gazette: “The audience on Bluesky is much different than on X. It is composed primarily of people who left X.

“In general, it's important to treat Bluesky like a serious platform instead of a fallback for X's diminishing audience; engage with the audience on Bluesky, and have journalists treat that audience as seriously as they do X's.

“If you put effort into creating a solid presence on Bluesky, you'll be rewarded with plenty of engagement despite the platform's vastly smaller size.”

She described the audience there as "very vibrant and extremely diverse in composition, generally tacking more to the centre-left than to the right.

"Understanding your audience is important no matter where or how you're doing journalism, so it's worthwhile spending some time trying to understand the needs of that audience."

What publishers are saying about Bluesky

Although its journalists are well-represented on Bluesky and it publishes regularly to the platform, the FT told Press Gazette its involvement is limited for now: “At the moment the FT has an autofeed and another for our journalists that people can follow. But generally we’re keeping an eye on how the platform performs before investing more resources.”

Emma Krstic, Politico’s director of engagement, Europe, told Press Gazette the publisher’s dabbling on Bluesky is “experimental”.

“I think with social in general… you need to try and be at the forefront of new platforms and see whether they're worth investing your time and resources in… When it's a new platform, you never quite know if people are going to really jump on it and it's going to take off.”

Politico is not a mass-market publication, gearing itself instead toward “people who are purely interested in politics and policy… so we’re trying to find spaces where those people congregate and we can reach them”.

Asked whether the brand was finding those people on Bluesky, Krstic said: “We’ve found a quite engaged audience, I'd say, for the size of our following at the moment.”

But a lack of audience analytics made it difficult to say for sure who they’re reaching.

She said: “Something we've in general found with jumping on new platforms is it can take a while for the analytics side of things to catch up… it's still in a way experimental, because you're just throwing things on there and seeing what data you can get back, or feedback from the audience to make a judgement call on.

“So it's still to be determined, I'd say, whether it's going to become a truly useful audience for us.”

Krstic’s comments echo those of other publishers. Asked about Bluesky earlier this year, The Washington Post’s deputy director, social, off-platform Travis Lyles told Press Gazette “​​it’s always important to keep tabs on up-and-coming social media platforms so you can make the right decision for your newsroom and meet readers where they are”.

The New York Times’ off-platform director similarly told Digiday: “We wouldn’t continue being on the platform and maintaining it every day if it wasn’t something that we thought was promising for the future but also currently delivering on the audience.”

For her part, the FT engineer and news feed maintainer Rininsland suggested Bluesky could represent a more profound shift around the way content is published and consumed online.

She said: “Bluesky is effectively two parts: AT Protocol, an underlying decentralised technology intended to facilitate publishing in a variety of formats, and Bluesky, a microblogging platform that's the flagship product of that technology.

“Attempting to understand how the protocol works and how that results in Bluesky working differently than traditional centralised social media platforms should be a priority task for any journalist seeking to seriously cover Bluesky.

“It's very easy to see it as a less-functional Twitter clone, but that really misses much of what makes Bluesky exciting as a piece of technology; in many ways, it resembles late 90s Internet, with much concurrent innovation and experimentation happening with many different individuals and groups — not just the Bluesky team.”

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Why do male voices dominate when it comes to news influencers on social media? The Reuters Institute Digital News Report asked a representative sample in Britain and the US to name any individual social media accounts they follow when it comes to news content and found that in both the UK and US all ten of the most popular news influencers were men.

When Press Gazette shared the list on Twitter, radio presenter Louise Hulland suggested a list of female news influencers: Victoria Derbyshire from the BBC, Emily Maitlis from Global, Shelagh Fogarty (BBC), Sophy Ridge from LBC and Beth Rigby from Sky.

ITV newsreader Marverine Cole noted that women of colour were also missing from the list. She said: “So many excellent female news broadcasters out there, across the board. Big question is how can that balance be achieved where weight and support (as revenue?) is put behind top female news and current affairs voices and faces?”.

And Sky News digital assistant Talya Varga suggested colleagues including Sophie Ridge, Yalda Hakim and Alex Crawford would be good female additions to the list.

In 2023, Press Gazette compiled a list of 180 UK journalists with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Nine out of the top ten most-followed individuals were men with Laura Kuenssberg from the BBC in fifth spot with 1.41 million followers.

The Collabstr 2024 Influence Marketing Report looked at 80,000 influencer profiles across major social media platforms globally and found that 70% are from women. However, these female influencers often orient their content towards beauty and lifestyle, rather than news.

According to The Missing Perspectives of Women in News Report in 2020, women remain a minority in newsrooms globally, especially when it comes to senior newsroom roles in the UK and US.

Press Gazette asked postdoctoral research fellow Amy Ross Arguedas, who helped write the 2024 Reuters Digital News Report, to explain the findings.

She said: “The gender imbalance, when it comes to top individual news-related accounts, is striking, especially when keeping in mind that women tend to be heavier users of social media in general.

“This is the case across all five countries analysed, where we see men almost exclusively dominate these lists of top five or ten news-related accounts mentioned.

“There are variety of factors that could be shaping this, both on the supply and demand side, many of which are impacted by gender norms and disparities in the broader culture. For example, on the demand side, it is possible that many audiences prefer following men for news on social and video platforms.

“Many of the individual accounts mentioned are largely focused on politics and political commentary, a traditionally male-dominated subject, and that might be magnifying the trend we see in the data. It’s also worth keeping in mind that this is a survey of audience perceptions and subject to recall biases, so another possibility is that people defaulted to providing examples of accounts centered on political topics when answering the question, even as they may also follow other kinds of accounts focused on more ‘soft’ news.

“Some of this could also be driven by the supply side of things, meaning there could be more men producing this kind of news-oriented content, and especially politics-focused content, on social media. Some research shows women are underrepresented in bylines of political news topics and this could be an extension of more traditional newsroom gender dynamics (which in turn can also be driven by unequal allocation of beats by newsroom managers as well as journalists’ preferences).

“However, there is also a lot of research documenting the online harassment of women journalists, often through social media (which can in some cases escalate to other forms of violence), and which could disincentivize more women from doing this kind of work online.”

We also asked Marverine Cole to expand on the comments she shared via X about the report. Cole is a newsreader for ITV’s Good Morning Britain and worked in broadcasting for 20 years.

She said: “I think the reason it is happening is because of the old adages that: men dominate generally in journalism, and media presenting; they are platformed more readily and white men in particular, men’s viewpoints are held paramount above women’s and women having any opinion often get shouted down and belittled when it comes to news topics, and we generally get abused for having one, full stop.

“Then when it comes to female journalists of colour we are few and far between in the industry anyway, so we’re even less likely to be hired, let alone be listened to, commissioned or promoted in this space. I started my politics podcast to have a ‘dog in the fight’ because I knew no-one was ever going to commission or resource me to do it, so I did it myself and carve my own path and narrative… I get appreciation for talking about things in a way, no other podcast is.”

Former BBC and Vice journalist Sophia Smith Galer has more than 500,000 follower on Tiktok.

Asked whether she thinks female influencers are being silenced by men, she said: “I’m not sure this is the case. I am confident that on Twitter it is mainly men who retweet each other and women retweet each other as that is what research has suggested.

“Male news influencers aren’t the problem – I would be asking news bosses about what they are doing to amplify women both internally and externally, and what they have done in the last year to serve women audiences.

“We also know from non-fiction readership that women are far more likely to read a book by men than the other way round. There is a fundamental issue here both with how women are amplified in journalism and their career progression; there’s also an issue with how much appetite men have as news audiences to pay attention to women.

“That’s not a problem of a select few high profile men online – that’s a problem of all men.”.

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Joey Barton has apologised to Jeremy Vine and agreed to pay the broadcaster £75,000 in damages to settle a High Court libel claim.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Barton said the allegations he made against Vine, including calling him a “bike nonce”, were “untrue”.

Vine had sued Barton for libel and harassment over 14 online posts, which included him calling Vine a “big bike nonce” and a “pedo defender” on X.

A High Court judge ruled last month that 11 of the posts could defame Mr Vine.

In a statement, Barton said: “Between 8 and 12 January 2024 I published 11 posts which accused Jeremy Vine of having a sexual interest in children, and created a hashtag which made the same allegations, which were viewed millions of times.

“I recognise that this is a very serious allegation. It is untrue. I do not believe that Mr Vine has a sexual interest in children, and I wish to set the record straight.

“I also published posts during the same period in which I referred to Mr Vine having advocated forced vaccination during the Covid 19 pandemic, based upon a video clip of his TV programme.

“I accept that he did not advocate this policy and that the video clip has been edited to give a misleading impression of what he was in fact saying.

“I then taunted and abused Mr Vine for bringing a legal complaint against me. I have agreed not to make the same allegations again about Mr Vine and I apologise to him for the distress he has suffered.

“To resolve his claims against me in defamation and harassment, I have agreed to pay Mr Vine £75,000 in damages and his legal costs.”

Lawyers for Vine told a hearing in London on 9 May that Barton posted several abusive tweets about the broadcaster in early January this year in a “calculated and sustained attack”.

Barton, who played for teams including Manchester City, Newcastle United, Rangers, and French side Marseille during his career, also began using “#bikenonce” on X, which led to it trending on the platform, the court was told.

Gervase de Wilde, representing Vine, said that the posts contained “clear references to [Vine] having a sexual interest in children” and that the word “nonce” had “an irreducible, defamatory meaning”.

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News consumers across the world are increasingly far more likely to access news via social media than they are by directly accessing publisher websites and apps.

The 2024 Reuters Digital News Report surveyed news consumers in 47 leading markets around the world with over 2,000 respondents in each territory (big exclusions included China and Russia).

Across all leading global media markets, social media is the main gateway to news for 29% of people (up from 23% six years ago, but slightly down compared with last year).

Search (dominated by Google) remains important, with 25% citing this as their main access point to news, compared to 24% in 2018.

There has been a sharp decline in the proportion saying that direct access to publisher websites and apps is their main access point for news, down from 32% six years ago to 22% in the latest survey.

Looking at UK sources of news, social media is now cited by 37% of respondents as the main way they came across news in the last week versus 14% for print. TV has declined from 79% to 50% over the last decade.

In the UK there has been a sharp fall in the number of 18 to 24 year-olds accessing news websites or apps directly, from 53% to 25% over the last decade.

The fall amongst 25 to 34 year-olds has been less sharp, down from 53% to 34%. For those aged 35 and above, publisher websites and apps have remained important, with 51% saying they used them over the last week, a figure which has remained level.

Looking at 11 leading media economies, the survey asked which social media networks people have used to access news over the last week.

Facebook remains the most popular source of news, but it has declined from 36% in 2014 citing it to 26% in the latest survey.

Youtube has grown from 16% to 22%, Whatsapp is up from 7% to 16% and Instagram is up from 2% to 15%. Twitter/X is steady on around 11% and Tiktok has grown sharply after emerging four years ago to be used by 8% for accessing news.

Looking at particular newsbrands and sources of news, the survey underlines the dominance of the BBC over the UK media scene. The BBC is also the only UK brand cited by a significant number of US survey respondents as a source they access on at least a weekly basis.

Looking at TV/radio/print, the BBC is twice as popular (48%) as second-placed ITV News. Looking at online it is nearly three times as likely to be cited (44%) as the second-placed Guardian website.

In the US, opinionated right of centre brand Fox News is the most likely to be cited as a weekly source for both online and looking at just TV/radio/print. Overall, US newsbrands are far more evenly split in terms of popularity.

The report found that in the UK mainstream news brands are most likely to be cited as a source of news by social media users, versus alternative news outlets and influencers.

Online native brand Politics Joe made the top five most-referenced outlets in the UK survey behind legacy brands BBC News, Sky News, The Guardian and ITV News.

When survey respondents to ask individual news accounts they pay attention to for news on social media, partisan and outspoken voices dominated and in both the UK and US all the named social media accounts cited by survey respondents were men.

See more on this phenomenon of “news influencers” from Digital News Report author Nic Newman here.

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In recent years large social and video networks, offering powerful creator tools and free global distribution, have provided a platform for an increasingly wide range of voices and perspectives. Most of this content has nothing to do with news. Much of it generates very little attention, but some accounts and individuals have become increasingly influential around politics, and a range of other subjects  

In previous research we have shown how in newer networks such as TikTok and Instagram as well as in long standing video platforms like YouTube, mainstream media are significantly challenged by a range so called creators, influencers, and assorted personalities, as well as smaller, alternative news outlets. This contrasts with networks such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) where mainstream media and journalists still tend to lead the conversation when it comes to news.

Who are the biggest ‘news influencers’ in the UK, US and France?

In this year’s Digital News Report, we wanted to understand more about who these news influencers are, what type of ‘news’ they discuss, and what this means for wider society. 

We did this by asking a random selection of people who use a range of popular networks including Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to name up to three mainstream and/or alternative accounts they followed most closely that related to news.

We then counted the most popular individuals and news brands from the combined data. We did this in around 20 countries around the world, but in this article, we explore findings in just three – the United Kingdom, the United States and France. 

United Kingdom: High representation of 'mainstream' journalists

Traditional UK news brands established an early and strong presence in social media networks such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook, but have been slower to adapt to newer networks.

Despite this, across all networks studied we find that the majority (57%) of all mentions were for mainstream news brands and their journalists and 43% for other individuals and alternative media.

Big broadcasters such as the BBC and Sky do best, along with The Guardian, but these brands are more challenged in YouTube and TikTok by a range of youth orientated outlets such as Politics Joe, LADbible, and TLDR News – and also by more partisan political outlets such as Novara Media and individual creators.

[Read more: Video brand TLDR finds way to make money providing news for the young]

When it comes to our list of top ten individual accounts, we also find a high representation of journalists from mainstream media brands.

Topping the list is LBC’s James O’Brien who has been particularly effective on YouTube and TikTok with smartly packaged video clips from his radio show regularly going viral. ITV’s political correspondent Robert Peston, an early adopter of social media, is in second place.

Also represented is former CNN, ITV, and TalkTV host Piers Morgan who recently took his eponymous Uncensored show online-only to get round what he calls the "unnecessary straitjacket" of TV schedules.

There is a clear absence of women in the most-mentioned list. Partisan perspectives are provided, on the left, by columnist and author Owen Jones and on the right by TV hosts from GB News. These include Nigel Farage, now leader of Reform UK, and Neil Oliver, whose controversial views on lockdowns and vaccinations have led to complaints to the broadcast regulator Ofcom. 

 
Comedian Russell Brand attracts an eclectic crowd for his outspoken, libertarian and anti-mainstream media views expressed manly via YouTube (and Rumble).

Sports journalists David Ornstein and Fabrizio Romano, both with a reputation for transfer scoops, are widely followed, as are others with specialist knowledge such as Dan Neidle, a former high-profile lawyer who breaks stories about dodgy tax affairs of the rich and famous. 

Influencer Dylan Page operates what he claims is the biggest English language news account on TikTok (10.6 million followers).

Celebrities, such as BBC football presenter and podcast entrepreneur Gary Lineker (nine million followers on X) tweet from time to time about politics and refugees and Elon Musk’s tweets (150 million followers) are also widely followed in the UK. 

United States: Much higher use of YouTube for news

We see a very different picture in the United States with much higher use of use of YouTube for news compared with the UK and a higher proportion of those users paying attention to alternative news sources.

X (formerly Twitter) is another important network for alternative voices in the US, where creators have been encouraged in recent years by owner Elon Musk. The network has recently refocused its strategy on video and is supporting commentators like Tucker Carlson, who was dismissed by Fox News, and has subsequently built a significant audience there.

Our list of the most mentioned individuals is headed by Carlson along with Joe Rogan who runs a successful daily show on YouTube (as well as Spotify).

It is striking that all of the most mentioned (top ten) individual names are known for political commentary or chat - rather than original newsgathering. Most of the content is partisan – with little or no attempt to put the other side, and the entire top ten list is made up of men.

Many of these names can hardly be called ‘alternative’, as they often come with decades of experience from legacy media, having previously been fixtures for years on traditional cable or talk radio networks.  

Some of these US individuals are attached to wider online networks, such as the Daily Wire and Blaze TV (conservative) and Young Turks and Medias Touch (progressive) that contain multiple creators within a wider brand. 

But whatever the politics, the look is remarkably consistent – somewhere between a podcast and a TV broadcast – with mostly male hosts armed with oversized microphones talking to mostly male guests.

Alternative voices received more citations in total from our US sample than traditional media, but mainstream media brands and their journalists still accounted for 42% of mentions with CNN and Fox News heading the list.  

On TikTok, however, alternative news approaches are also prominent, such as @underthedesknews, an account which features creator V Spehar presenting news updates from a lying down position to contrast with the formulaic ‘over the desk’ approach on mainstream TV. The account has over three million subscribers with content aimed at explaining current events and news for younger audiences. 

Elon Musk regularly posts content on subjects such as free speech, AI, and the failings of mainstream media. Donald Trump was also frequently mentioned and has 65 million followers on X and 6.5 million on Truth Social. 

France: Young news influencers lead the way

In France, we find mainstream media challenged on social and video platforms by a range of alternative media including a number of young news influencers.

Head and shoulders above others we find YouTuber and podcaster Hugo Travers, 27, known online as Hugo Décrypte, (literally Hugo Deciphers … the news). With 2.6 million subscribers on his main channel on YouTube and 5.7 million on TikTok, he has become a leading news source for young French people.  

In our survey data, Décrypte received more mentions than Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation combined. His followers had an average age of 27, around 20 years younger than many other news brands according to our data. Travers regularly interviews top politicians and global figures such as Bill Gates. The social media generation “won’t start reading a newspaper or watching the news on TV at 30,” he says.

Youth focused news brands such as Brut and Konbini have also built large audiences via social and video distribution. This level of engagement highlights the weakness of many traditional French news brands, which still primarily cater for older elites and have been slow to innovate through social platforms.

Protecting the environment has become an important theme for alternative voices with Hugo Clément (32) and Salomé Saqué (28) two prominent voices, who have built their ecological reputations through social media.

Meanwhile many older, male, right learning commentators, such as Pascal Praud and former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, are extending their influence through like-minded and mostly older communities on X and Facebook.

Far right politicians such as Marine Le Pen (one million followers on TikTok) and her 28 year old protégé  Jordan Bardella (1.6 million) were also mentioned in our data as the National Rally leader successfully targeted the youth vote ahead of the European elections. 

Implications for mainstream media from news influencer findings

Looking across our three selected countries we find that news related accounts of any kind are cited more often in the United States than they are in the UK or France.

In the United States we also find a greater number of alternative news or individual accounts mentioned as opposed to mainstream news brands and journalists, suggesting that the trend towards news influencers is far more developed here.

In the United Kingdom, by contrast mainstream media brands and journalists are both active and widely followed leaving less of a gap for independent operators. 

Digging further into the content itself, we find that many of the most cited accounts belong to partisan political commentators (from left and right), some of whom have been criticised for factual inaccuracies and for spreading conspiracies or misleading narratives, even as they are highly trusted by those who share their political views.

Many of the commentators now committed to online distribution emphasise their ability to speak freely (e.g. Tucker Carlson Unfiltered, Piers Morgan Uncensored), setting themselves up as an alternative to a mainstream media that they say ‘suppresses the truth’ or is driven by ‘elite and corporate interests’. But any increase in the range of views is not matched by diversity, with the most popular accounts mostly white and male in the three countries included here. 

A second important trend is the popularity of news creators and influencers that speak to younger audiences, mostly using video formats. In France Hugo Décrypte is blazing a trail in trying to make news more accessible and entertaining. Elsewhere brands such as Brut, Politics Joe, and TLDR News are engaging a large number of under 35s using younger hosts, as well as an agenda that includes more content about climate, social justice and mental health.

The vitality of alternative voices in social and video networks in some ways highlights perceived weaknesses of news organisations on such issues as trust, diversity, and digital storytelling – at least with some people. All this means that traditional media still has much to learn on how to better engage audiences in this increasingly complex and competitive space while staying true to its mission and values.

You can read more detail about news consumption across countries and about wider audience trends at www.digitalnewsreport.org/2024.

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