My experience with the news-driven media platform Bluesky (the blessed free refuge from TAFKAT*) has been revealing in a number of ways, the most significant of which is how much actual news I’ve been getting.
Sure, there are plenty of opinions — why not? — but the news media are eminently represented. And what I mean is, I’m reading news, factual news reports, from around the world. Along with my daily read of the New York Times and the Daily News, I’m seeing a whole bunch of journals and newspapers I’ve not seen previously.
And some of them are doing terrific work in exposing the outrageous moves coming out of this CouPutsch we’re watching with the nausea and horror of an audience forced to view a sadistic (sur)reality TV show.
One of the advantages of Bluesky is its helping hand in selecting whom and what to follow. When you open an account, you are given options to select bunches of media and/or people to follow, rather than having to select them individually. So that’s how I wound up following news media I’ve been long aware of but haven’t the wherewithal to follow, as well as newspapers from countries, states and municipalities I normally pay little attention to and have been a welcome surprise to me.
(Of course, the major newspapers, network and cable news venues are fully represented on Bluesky. One thing that’s fascinated me is reading the headline news and then seeing posts from Fox News…which seems never to note any news of any large-scale importance.)
Following is a list of news venues I particularly value. (I’m not providing links, since you’ll get them on Bluesky.) Not in alphabetical or any other order:
- ProPublica
- WIRED
- Rolling Stone
- The Guardian
- Reuters
- Associated Press
- Financial Times
- Mother Jones
- Democracy Docket
- The Onion
- The Independent
- Mississippi Free Press
- Ars Technica
- The New Republic
- The Tennessee Holler
- Raw Story
*The App Formerly Known As Twitter, Paul Krugman’s marvelous acronym