Ground News - news aggregator

[FINate]

When it comes to news, I like to read around and get different perspectives. A little from the Left, a little from the Right, but mostly Center. I even like to occasionally see what the crazies are saying at the extremes because I like to know what my hard-core conservative/liberal friends are talking about :)

I suffered with Google News for too long. It's free and familiar, but increasingly frustrating. Stories about the Royal Family? Sportsball? Celebrity gossip? STAHP! Not news, don't care! And while I have a pretty good mental map of the biases involved, it can be difficult to keep it all straight.

I came across Ground News after a bit of research and am so delighted with it that I thought I would share it here. I'm not affiliated with Ground News nor am I getting any sort of deal from them. I just really like the service so far and decided to pay for the Premium Package (something like $2.50/month). Yes, I'm one of those weirdos that would rather pay for services that I like. Disclaimer: Many of the features discussed below are only in the paid version.

Things I like:

Every source is tagged with a bias rating averaged from Ad Fondes Media, All Sides, and Media Bias. Clicking on a news source shows its bias ratings, ownership details, Factuality rating, and other interesting details.

Clicking on an aggregated headline/topic brings you to a dashboard that sorts articles from Left to Center to Right. Each source is displayed with its Bias and Factuality rating. It's super easy to navigate between different sources to explore how different biases affect the news.

Now this is where things get really interesting. With this additional metadata it becomes possible to do further analysis. There's a feature called Blindspot that highlights the editorial bias across the political spectrum. This makes it really easy to see topics that the Left is reporting on that are mostly being ignored by the Right, and vice versa. I could always kinda sense this while reading lots of different sources, but it's really interesting to see it so obviously spelled out with data, including things like a bias distribution histogram. I also really enjoy the weekly Blindspot report that picks on some of the most glaring examples.

Ground News also makes it easy to configure what topics I'm interested in for my personal feed, but more importantly, stuff I just don't care about. And it actually does a great job of filtering out the crap.

So far my only real criticism is that they could do a better job showing how old a topic is and making it possible to filter out stuff that's more than X days old or whatever. Maybe this will organically improve as I use it more, or perhaps there's a feature for this that I haven't discovered.

The end result of all this is that I can now get a well rounded read of the news in less time while gaining new insights about how media on all sides spins narratives.

Maybe this is old news and you all already use Ground News... I'm often late to the party :) Regardless, are there any other Ground News fans here? Any other features I should know about? Are there other competitors that do similar things that I should consider?

[Just Joe]

Thanks, I'll give them a look. Google News is all the things you described lately despite my attempts to curate a list of subjects and sources I'm interested in.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Google News was recently redesigned to use screen real estate less efficiently, making it much less of a summary and more of an exercise in scrolling.  So its good timing to have a replacement, as I dropped Google News from my bookmarks after having it there for years.

I notice Ground News has what looks like French flags next to each article - but apparently its a Red/Blue rating system.  They're tracking to what extent Democrats and Republicans see each topic?  Or something like that - it's interesting.

[GilesMM]

It's interesting but I don't an additional deliberate injection of politics into my newsfeed.

[cool7hand]

+1 on endorsing Ground News. It's so interesting to see how left, center, and right caption and write stories from their own spin. Perception of reality is truly changed by underlying assumptions.

[Dicey]

PTF

[FINate]

I notice Ground News has what looks like French flags next to each article - but apparently its a Red/Blue rating system.  They're tracking to what extent Democrats and Republicans see each topic?  Or something like that - it's interesting.

Correct. The "French flags" show the distribution of Left, Center, and Right news sources reporting on a topic.

[FINate]

It's interesting but I don't an additional deliberate injection of politics into my newsfeed.

Ground News isn't injecting politics, but rather highlighting existing biases.

[FINate]

For those interested, attached are some screenshots of how the Blindspot feature highlights editorial bias.

The first attachment shows tpics that are blindspots for both the Left and Right, with bar graphs of showing the distribution of coverage.

The second attachment is the detailed view for one of these topics (in this case, the FTX story). Notice that each source is tagged with its bias rating, factuality rating, ownership and, in the case of Bloomberg, a tag indicating a wealthy private owner. Notice, it still has flaws.

The Audacity story on that last screenshot is shown as "Center" and "Highly Factual" which may be true for audacity.com in general, but in this case the article is a Glenn Beck podcast hosted on audacity.com... so the rating system isn't perfect. I've noticed something similar with other syndicated content, e.g. the same AP story showing up on sites with different bias ratings.

[FINate]

Still using and enjoying Ground News. Impressed by the Blindspot feature and how easy it is to see the editorial bias on both sides. In many cases I just read the short synopsis and move on.

Occasionally I check Google News to see how it compares. Ground News hasn't missed any major events. What I notice most is how addictive Google News now feels. Everything seems designed to suck me into a bottomless pit of opinion pieces, frivolous stories (celeb rumors, etc.), and feeding on the 24x7 news cycle constantly rehashing the same topic. At one point I was checking Google News multiple times per day, whereas I check Ground News once every day or two. I consider that a win.

[Loren Ver]

I've pretty news light, but I went ahead and got the free version to see how it goes. 

[BicycleB]

Still using and enjoying Ground News. Impressed by the Blindspot feature and how easy it is to see the editorial bias on both sides. In many cases I just read the short synopsis and move on.

Occasionally I check Google News to see how it compares. Ground News hasn't missed any major events. What I notice most is how addictive Google News now feels. Everything seems designed to suck me into a bottomless pit of opinion pieces, frivolous stories (celeb rumors, etc.), and feeding on the 24x7 news cycle constantly rehashing the same topic. At one point I was checking Google News multiple times per day, whereas I check Ground News once every day or two. I consider that a win.

Glad you bumped this. Had not heard of it.

Highly impressed (despite the failure to distinguish wire services from the outlets that publish them). May use paid version sometime. Addictive Google example helpful too. Thanks, @FINate!

[dang1]

"Inoreader couldn't find any public feeds from ground.news"

[RetiredAt63]

I looked at it and it had quite a bit of Canadian news for a Canadian IP.  But the colours- they need to adjust for other countries.  Here Blue is Conservative, Red is Liberal (not to mention no orange or green or pale blue) so the colour chart was totally confusing.  Plus since I have no idea how they do the algorithm, I can't help but wonder if they are classifying things as liberal that Canadians would think were middle, because in general we are more left-leaning than the US is.  Or to be more accurate, in the G20 the US is the most right-leaning country by far.  By our standards your parties are far-right (Republicans) and slightly to the right (Democrats).  In reality, our Liberals (the Reds) are basically middle-of-the-road, the NDP are the "liberals".

If OP wants differing views, why not read foreign news services?  When I have been in the US I have found their news services tend to ignore foreign news as if it doesn't exist*.  There are easily accessible news sources in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, to just look at easy English-language sources.  A news source I found to be very good when I was in New Zealand was Al Jazeera.  And it would give OP a better idea of how other countries view the US by what gets covered.



*Not to mention horribly US-centric Olympics reporting.  Really horrible, last time I watched NBC during an Olympic games.

[FINate]

I looked at it and it had quite a bit of Canadian news for a Canadian IP.  But the colours- they need to adjust for other countries.  Here Blue is Conservative, Red is Liberal (not to mention no orange or green or pale blue) so the colour chart was totally confusing.  Plus since I have no idea how they do the algorithm, I can't help but wonder if they are classifying things as liberal that Canadians would think were middle, because in general we are more left-leaning than the US is.  Or to be more accurate, in the G20 the US is the most right-leaning country by far.  By our standards your parties are far-right (Republicans) and slightly to the right (Democrats).  In reality, our Liberals (the Reds) are basically middle-of-the-road, the NDP are the "liberals".

If OP wants differing views, why not read foreign news services?  When I have been in the US I have found their news services tend to ignore foreign news as if it doesn't exist*.  There are easily accessible news sources in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, to just look at easy English-language sources.  A news source I found to be very good when I was in New Zealand was Al Jazeera.  And it would give OP a better idea of how other countries view the US by what gets covered.



*Not to mention horribly US-centric Olympics reporting.  Really horrible, last time I watched NBC during an Olympic games.

In the app settings, under Preferences, change from US to Canadian edition and the color coding is correct.

[rocketpj]

I like it, I'm a fan.  I admit I generally don't read the articles it shows me in my 'blindspots' - as a rule I don't read articles where the headline contains blatant value assertions.*  But I do appreciate the insight into what others are seeing, and it is quite detailed.

*e.g. "Biden attacks your family in unhinged rant', an actual headline I've seen on a newspaper recently.

[RetiredAt63]

I looked at it and it had quite a bit of Canadian news for a Canadian IP.  But the colours- they need to adjust for other countries.  Here Blue is Conservative, Red is Liberal (not to mention no orange or green or pale blue) so the colour chart was totally confusing.  Plus since I have no idea how they do the algorithm, I can't help but wonder if they are classifying things as liberal that Canadians would think were middle, because in general we are more left-leaning than the US is.  Or to be more accurate, in the G20 the US is the most right-leaning country by far.  By our standards your parties are far-right (Republicans) and slightly to the right (Democrats).  In reality, our Liberals (the Reds) are basically middle-of-the-road, the NDP are the "liberals".

If OP wants differing views, why not read foreign news services?  When I have been in the US I have found their news services tend to ignore foreign news as if it doesn't exist*.  There are easily accessible news sources in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, to just look at easy English-language sources.  A news source I found to be very good when I was in New Zealand was Al Jazeera.  And it would give OP a better idea of how other countries view the US by what gets covered.



*Not to mention horribly US-centric Olympics reporting.  Really horrible, last time I watched NBC during an Olympic games.

In the app settings, under Preferences, change from US to Canadian edition and the color coding is correct.

Thanks for the heads-up.

I doubt I'll use it much, but I will head into the settings just to see what they have for various countries.  Not every country uses blue/red I am guessing.