Scroll through your Facebook, Twitter or other social media feeds for a minute or two, and you might find a political story with angry comment threads or a news hoax that has tricked users into thinking it’s a true story. Following constant news updates can be overwhelming for many people; in fact, almost 70 percent of Americans say they experience "news fatigue" from trying to keep up with the daily news cycle.
But one newly launched app hopes to provide consumers with a less stressful way to stay informed.
SUJO, a Chicago-based app that curates and summarizes news and opinion pieces from verified publications and reputable influencers, launched May 21. The app, founded by Daniel Rendon and run by professional journalists, shares articles from mainstream outlets and publications of varying political leanings, though news sources are never labeled liberal, conservative or other political ideologies. Rendon, SUJO’s CEO, is a former director at CBS Local Digital Media.
“One reason why we created SUJO is to help people pierce those filter bubbles,” Rendon said. For consumers seeking news from a variety of viewpoints, “we summarize it, curate it and pair it to make it easy for people to get that other perspective.”
The app has a live Twitter-like feed featuring a stream of news, influencer and user posts. Professional journalists manually vet and summarize news articles before posting on the site. Journalists will add stories that have been independently reported with multiple sources, check with fact-checking sources like Politifact and Poynter International Fact-Checker’s list network, and assess whether the piece has an objective voice. In a user's news feed, blue-tinted stories indicate news, purple is for opinion and green means it's a story shared by another user.
The journalists will also post op-eds in tandem with news stories, within reason. Some influencers, like content from Infowars.com founder Alex Jones, will not be posted on the platform if their content repeatedly disinforms consumers. But other influencers, like far-right activist Lauren Southern, have been posted to the platform if they have a sizable following. The value in doing so, Rendon said, is to see what other information people from other political or ideological perspectives are receiving.
SUJO has been downloaded 8,500 times (about 3,500 users have returned to the app) since it launched. Though the figure exceeds SUJO’s initial target, the company is focused on increasing the number of users, Rendon said. The app currently does not sell advertising, but it is considering introducing branded content on the platform and possibly adding an ad-free subscription in the future. The company does not collect or sell user data to external parties, Rendon said.
Unlike other social media platforms, SUJO does not allow users to send direct messages, establish groups, leave “likes,” or give more than one response to a general question about a news story. Users can use their full names to use the platform, but aren't required to do so if they wish to remain anonymous. Doing so, Rendon said, allows users to have some separation between their news consumption and their social interactions.
“There isn’t a place that aggregates influencer content from multiple sources and puts it one place around the topics that people care about,” Rendon said. “We want to give [consumers] a comfortable place to give their thoughts, answer a question, and get a perspective from conservatives that are juxtaposed with liberals.”
