Each pub has its own guidelines, and some of those do feel like a "secret knock"!

But you really only need a few pubs. And in your case as in mine, because your stories so often relate to news, you need pubs that publish fast (which keeps me from submitting to some that I like but have found to be too unpredictable on that count).

A good fast poster is the Pub, which has a delightful editor and typically publishes within a day or less Once he actually asked me if it was "OK" to publish in two b/c of a weekend. That just doesn't happen.

You might also want to do 150-word teasers for your stories (after you publish them) on Everything Shortform, which usually publishes you within a few hours. Posting there doesn't help with Boosts (they're separate), but is really helpful in three ways: 1) you can get extra eyeballs; 2) you can do a short news item on something you don't want to write a full piece about (tag it News); and you can tease a published story under a different hed, which sometimes gets a bigger response than the original one. And @kevinalexander and @thenoahlevy are the easiest editors on the planet to work for.