Q&A: Alum’s new app encourages users to read across political spectrum

UCLA School of Law alumnus Nick Lum said that in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, he noticed the existence of information-sharing bubbles around certain groups of people, like around universities or middle America.

Lum developed Read Across the Aisle, a new mobile app that encourages users to read news from both sides of the political spectrum. The Daily Bruin’s Ryan Leou talked with Lum about why he created the app and what changes he hopes it will bring.

Daily Bruin: What made you want to create the app?

Nick Lum: Over the last year, it was pretty obvious the country has become more divided than it had been before, or than we had realized. In social media, people were living in bubbles, not aware of facts or arguments that exist on other side. It’s not productive to have two groups of people yelling at each other, not listening to each other.

Right after the election, a number of my friends said they wanted to get high quality news from the other side of the political spectrum. Not necessarily the far other side, but they wanted to balance their media diet.

I had another reader app, which I built with a startup and have been working with for the past couple of years. I somewhat adapted it to make Read Across the Aisle.

DB: What was the process for developing the app?

NL: I got the idea last year, only over the holidays. I talked with a developer to get a cost estimate, then spent Christmas building a Kickstarter, which ran for about a month. We reached our goal several days before deadline, and we reached 120 percent of our goal by the end of the campaign.

It took about a little over a week to get data – asking, “Which news sites do you want in the app?” Higher tier backers (on Kickstarter) got to choose what they wanted to see in voting, then voting was open to everyone. We also had to adjust partisanship ratings to make sure people knew what to expect – what’s right, what’s left, what’s center.

DB: How does the app make sure the sources it adds are credible?

NL: Pew Research Center has data on the political leanings of media organizations, and so do The Washington Post and others.

Some people are not opposed to having less reliable content, insofar as it is a tool for opposition research. We sent the app around to (former President Barack) Obama (administration) alumni and other political research Facebook groups. Part of the reason it got traction around partisans, like the left, was because they were not in touch with the other side this last cycle. Then there are some people looking for high quality, more moderate sites.

The news sites range from The Huffington Post to Fox News. We don’t want people to get angry that they’re reading stuff that they hate. If a site has fake news or unreliable reporting, or even really heavy selection bias, that merits them a more extreme rating.

DB: Why and how does the app encourage users to stay in the middle?

NL: If someone gets all the way to the edge, the app asks for $20 if you want to continue reading. If you don’t want to pay, you’ll read some stories from the opposite side. We hope (no one will) and expect no one to pay that fee, but we needed to put some teeth on the app.

The goal is not to make people moderate. The goal is to make people read from both sides of the political spectrum. We also want to build in some gamification in the app, possibly by having different levels where you keep the slider indicator in the middle for X number of hours. There might also be an incentive around showing people a history of what they’ve been reading, sort of how you have a step counter. That way, people can see their own historical trends in the future.

DB: Are you thinking about adding sites? What would the process be?

NL: The app is still in its early days – we’re still figuring out what the formal process will be. We get suggestions, and if we get a lot of the same ones, we look hard at them. I think we’ve got most of the big sites that people want through the Kickstarter campaign, but I’m open to including others. I’m just worried if we get to 20 to 25 to 30 sites, we’ll have to put things in folders, which would take away from the simplicity of the app.