Read Across The Aisle v2.0
We launched Read Across The Aisle in early 2017, in reaction to the outcry about filter bubbles that followed the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as President. Our goal was to help people take a look at their media diets and help them discover some news sources that can they might not see in their social media feeds.
When we went live, we featured just a handful of news sites in our app, and one of the main things we heard was that people wanted to be able to add in even more sources. But of course, different people wanted different sources, and we didn’t want the app to be overloaded with dozens or hundreds of different news sources. So we left it with just a handful of sites on the left and on the right.
Today, we are releasing a new version of our iOS app, which allows readers to customize their reading list and choose their personalized reading list from our master list of sites. As before, we are crowdsourcing our site list, and the partisanship rating of each site. If you would like to suggest a site to be included on the master list, or vote on the appropriate partisanship rating for a site, you can do so here.
We are sad to say that we are no longer able to offer the free WSJ access that was included in our app for nearly two years. During this time, our partnership with the WSJ allowed tens of thousands of our readers to access WSJ content absolutely free, totaling millions of dollars of saved membership fees. We are very sorry not to be able to continue offering this service, but we are glad that so many people have found it helpful over the years. We have been heartened to see that most of our users have continued to use the app for its primary purpose (fighting filter bubbles) even after the WSJ integration stopped working last year.
We hope that our new iOS app and the customization ability that it offers will help people continue to read about different perspectives and think about the common ground that we share.
If you would like to help join the fight against media bias and filter bubbles, please reach out via our website (especially if you are an Android dev or want to help out with internationalization)!
Read Across The Aisle is a project of BeeLine Reader, a company dedicated to helping people read more easily and efficiently on screen. Our award-winning technology is included free in the Read Across The Aisle iOS app. For more information about Read Across The Aisle or BeeLine Reader, please check out our websites.
