Dattner Dispoto and Associates (DDA) has on the feature front booked DP Noah Greenberg to lens director Craig MacNeil’s untitled Lizzie Borden project. DDA has also secured for editor David Leonard the film Zealot being directed by Danny Abeckaser….
Stephen Arnold Music, based in Dallas with offices in San Diego and New York, has added Mark Sanders as its director of business development. With over a decade of experience in radio, digital, sports and sponsorship sales at CBS and Clear Channel (iHeart) Radio, Sanders brings a deep personal network and expert knowledge of integrated media to Stephen Arnold Music. Most recently, he was director of national sales, Texas, for CBS Radio, and prior to that served as sr. account rep and national sales manager at Clear Channel/iHeart Radio in Austin….
Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk's X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner's support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta's Threads and its algorithms.
The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter's core mechanic. That's unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky's growth trajectory — with a user base that has more than doubled since October — could make it a serious competitor to other social platforms.
But with growth comes growing pains. It's not just human users who've been flocking to Bluesky but also bots, including those designed to create partisan division or direct users to junk websites.
The skyrocketing user base — now surpassing 25 million — is the biggest test yet for a relatively young platform that has branded itself as a social media alternative free of the problems plaguing its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly active app users on iOS and Android in November, an increase of 295.4% since October. It also saw 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits, in the same period, up 189% from October.
Besides the U.S. elections, Bluesky also got a boost when X was briefly banned in Brazil.
"They got this spike in attention, they've crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One's... Read More
