Annafi Wahed wants you to know both sides of an issue. Meet The Flip Side.

The article is a repost with the support of the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, a coalition of 30 local newsrooms to support and promote local journalism across the region for the public’s benefit.

Annafi Wahed first realized she was living in a bubble after the results of the 2016 presidential election which surprised her and her circle of friends. “Growing up in an immigrant community, and going to Bryn Mawr, I didn’t know anyone in New York who would admit to voting for Trump,” she says today over a chai latte at Yinz Coffee in Bloomfield.

That soon changed. Following the election, when all her liberal friends asked what just happened, Wahed attempted to figure it out. She started reading news and commentary from all sources, including the far-right Breitbart, and sent 16 friends a summary of viewpoints from both conservative and liberal publications. 

She didn’t know it at the time, but that email was the prototype of what would become her daily newsletter called The Flip Side, an aggregate news publication presenting both sides of an issue. 

Each newsletter focuses on a single issue – Hassan Nasrollah in one recent example—and presents excerpts of editorial from, say, the National Review, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal from the right and, from the left, The Guardian, Washington Post and The Atlantic. 

Some sites, she explains, send out aggregate news by link so you must click to read the story. The staff at the Flip Side reads volumes of stories and editorials and highlights excerpts of the best so readers quickly get the gist of the perspectives. “We try to pack as much content as possible in the shortest time,” she says.

From 2017 to 2020, the Flip Side was a side project for Wahed as she lived in Queens, New York. Then she and Jihan Varisco, a conservative who became her co-founder and the voice of the right, raised seed money for their business and reeled in 17,000 subscribers from across the country.

On their site, they promote it as “Real news. Real perspectives. Curated and written by real people.” 

“We don’t think it’s possible to be nonpartisan but we‘re equally partisan,” Wahed says. “We have at least one liberal and one conservative eye on the newsletter and worked very hard to develop a bipartisan audience.” She was pleased to see the results of a recent subscriber survey of subscribers make that clear. 

Today, the newsletter has more than 200,000 subscribers and Wahed has made a name for herself, appearing on Fox and Friends, being featured in Fast Company, and writing op-eds in The Hill, the Wall Street Journal and more. 

She was on a panel at Newsapalooza, a gathering of journalists in Pittsburgh in late September where, among other things, she lamented the “clickbait” content we devour online: “Clickbait exists because people click on it.”  

She then challenged the audience with this query: “Everyone knows Marjorie Taylor Green’s name, but do you know who is in the problem solver caucus?” (Find out here.) 

Who’s reading The Flip Side? Wahed says they have a surprising number of college students who read it, and it’s used as a teaching tool in school classrooms. “Also strong partisans who don’t feel like they know how to talk to people in their lives anymore,” she notes. “They find us to be the most accessible way to find out what the zeitgeist is talking about. We try to show the grays on both sides.”

Does she think nuance is missing in news coverage today? “Very much, yes,” answers the Bangladesh native.

Wahed and her mother moved to the United States from Dhaka when she was eight. They had family in New York which is where they relocated and where she stayed –in Queens and then more recently Harlem–until she needed a change of pace two years ago. 

A college friend had moved to Pittsburgh and encouraged her to do the same. She did, signing a lease for an apartment unseen. 

She, too, now loves the city, from her vantage point on the border of Shadyside and East Liberty where she walks everywhere or relies on Uber to get around. 

“Allegheny County is a purple county,” she says, “with so many wonderful civic and advocacy organizations here.

“I made wonderful friends at startups. The ecosystem is small but welcoming. Kit (Mueller) and Adam (Paulisick) took me under their wing. They have been such amazing mentors to me,” she says. Through them, she found Matt Harris, a United Kingdom native who spent five years building Twitter starting in 2010. He now lives in Fox Chapel and works as their part-time CTO. 

That said, Wahed admits that parts of the startup ecosystem aren’t so great. She spent the summer in San Francisco seeking investor funding after coming up short in Pittsburgh and says she has an investor who will match $100,000 from others. 

She would like to stay in Pittsburgh and hopes to get more local funding so that’s possible.  “It’s just a really nice place to live,” says the former New Yorker. “For a small city so much is going on.” She cites the affordability, the hiking trails, and the breweries. “I’ve seen a couple of great plays, and the symphony is amazing. And the museums! The dinosaur collection at the Carnegie is unreal.” 

While she continues to raise money, she and her small team are trying to transition from a media company to a platform, launching a competitor to Twitter that is now available to paid subscribers. The difference, she points out, is “a proprietary algorithm that actively incentives bipartisanship and thoughtfulness.”

For example, there’s a helpful/unhelpful marker for posts to incentivize people to reach users on the other side. The greatest number of helpful votes from the other side gets boosted. It makes for a “pro-social, pro-democracy, pro-bipartisan platform.”

The mission of The Flip Side on their social media platform, she says, is not to show the most extreme views but rather, to offer the best arguments from both sides. 

While Wahed dwells in the chaotic, polarized world of politics, she holds hope for society since “there are still a lot of good people holding down the fort.”  As one example, she cites the state GOP Senator Mike McDonnell who held his ground and said no to the proposed winner-take-all changes in the Nebraska’s electoral votes 40 days before the election. 

It helps that Wahed understands the difference between the aggressive and divisive personas on social media and the real people behind them. “I’ve met so many people who seem insane on social media and then I meet them in real life, and I go, hey you’re actually nice and social and interesting.” 

Like many others, she’s concerned about the decrease in local news in recent years. “When local news disappears, you have increased polarization and people turn to national news stories,” she said in an appearance on the podcast Influence FM. When people are no longer as involved with local issues, voter participation decreases, and local government expenditures increase because there’s no longer a watch dog, she argued. “You need that watch dog to keep our governments honest.” 

On the podcast, Wahed makes for an engaging guest, switching with ease and persuasive detail on a host of topics, from the need to understand the history of government to make sense of where we are today, to the current crisis in Bangladesh. 

And as a model spokesperson for her publication, she makes the rounds, talking passionately about her newsletter with everyone from members of US Congress to billionaire business folks and investors. “We punch way above our weight. People are surprised,” she says, adding, “it’s a small team and a labor of love.”