Bluesky vs. X activity across 50 state newsrooms

Frozen roster and dates

The denominator was frozen before activity classification. It contains one organization for each state from the States Newsroom directory , excluding Stateline and the Washington, D.C., bureau. The roster and method were frozen on August 27, 2026. Observations were collected August 27–28, 2026 UTC.

States Newsroom says it fully funds outlets in 39 states and works with independent nonprofit partners in 11. This cohort includes both groups.

Identity rule

An identity was accepted only when organization-controlled first-party material or multiple agreeing public profile signals established one unique organization account. Similar names and third-party directories alone did not qualify. Bluesky bridge accounts and invalid handles were excluded.

Four Bluesky identities and two X identities remained unavailable. Those rows were not classified as absent or inactive.

Activity rule

Activity means at least one item at or after the cutoff on one minimum permitted most-recent page. Bluesky used one author-feed item. X used one page of up to five posts. No pagination was fetched.

Bluesky describes its author feed as posts and reposts by the author. X describes user posts as posts authored by a user. Reposts may therefore count differently across platforms. The method answers a yes-or-no recency question; it does not estimate posting frequency.

Missingness sensitivity

The conservative assignment treats all four unavailable Bluesky identities as inactive and both unavailable X identities as active: 46/50 versus 12/50, a 68-point difference. The opposite assignment gives 50/50 versus 10/50, an 80-point difference. The primary table keeps all six identities unavailable.

Provider and resource accounting

The retained Bluesky pass used 142 public API calls: 50 actor searches, 46 profile reads, and 46 one-item author-feed reads. Bluesky charged no study fee.

The accepted X work used user lookups and minimum timeline pages under frozen stopping rules. The cumulative pricing-equivalent upper bound was approximately USD 2.465 under the retained provider price assumptions. The USD 2.465 estimate is a resource-accounting ceiling. A verified invoice charge was unavailable.

The download contains aggregate classifications only. It excludes post text, post IDs, numeric user IDs, individual account timestamps, profile descriptions, search snippets, provider payloads, credentials, private data, and customer data.