Ground News
Screenshot Screenshot of the international edition of the website on September 18, 2025 | |
| Headquarters | Ontario, Canada |
|---|---|
| CEO | Harleen Kaur |
| Key people | Sukh Singh (CTO) |
| URL | ground |
| Launched | January 15, 2020 |
Ground News is a Canadian news aggregation service founded by Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh in 2020. It functions as a news aggregator with an emphasis on eliminating political blind spots of its readers.
Background
Ground News was co-founded on January 15, 2020, by siblings Sukh Singh and Harleen Kaur, the latter of whom was a former engineer at NASA.[1][2][3] Kaur and Singh are CEO and CTO respectively.[2] The company states that it is staffed by 18 "media outsiders" and is headquartered in Ontario, Canada.[4]
Content
The stated goal of the service is to counteract media bias by displaying news events with sources from across the political spectrum.[5] When a story is selected on Ground News, the user will see several outlets that have reported on the story labeled by their political leaning.[2] Ground News follows a freemium model,[6] which allows users to view news as a guest, with a free account, or with a paid account.[2]
Ratings
The service marks every news source with a bias rating using terms borrowed from the left–right political spectrum. According to Ground News, sources on the far-left and far-right "use loaded words, publish misleading reports or leave out information" and are associated with the "most extreme [left-leaning or right-leaning] party members."[7] While the bias ratings can be accessed with a free account, Ground News also provides factuality ratings behind a paywall.[6] Both these ratings are averaged out from the ratings of three companies: AllSides, Media Bias/Fact Check, and Ad Fontes Media, who each have their own methods for determining factuality and bias.[8][9] In April 2024, Ground News used this method to rate CNN as "left-leaning", the Associated Press as "center", and Fox News as "right-leaning".[10]
Blindspot
Ground News creates a weekly "blindspot" report, highlighting stories that received little to no coverage from one side of the political spectrum. Ground News uses natural language processing algorithms to identify related news stories, including ones that use differing vocabulary.[2][9]
Marketing
Promotion of Ground News heavily relies on social media marketing through sponsorship of YouTubers. Martina di Licosa of the Columbia Journalism Review said that these promoters span political beliefs, from left-wing commentator Adam Conover to far-right figures.[8]
Reception
A 2024 study by political scientist Curtis Bram reviewed the blindspot's capability to reduce political polarization, concluding that "addressing 'Blindspots' through this non-confrontational, information-sharing approach may be a promising method to mitigate polarization."[11] The Columbia Journalism Review criticized Ground News' automated system of aggregation and its paywalls on factuality ratings.[8] College & Research Libraries News reviewed the service to be "useful to anyone wanting to examine ideological bias in the news or evaluate the factuality of a source. However, some might find the free features limiting and get quickly frustrated by features that are locked behind a paywall."[1]
References
- ^ a b Matthies 2022.
- ^ a b c d e Mateos, Evelyn (April 14, 2020). "Ground News Allows Consumers to Judge the News for Themselves". Editor & Publisher (trade news magazine). Fountain Valley, California: Mike Blinder. ISSN 0013-094X. Archived from the original on December 18, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2025.
- ^ Flemming, Jordan (November 21, 2024). "Founder spotlight: Sukh Singh on his journey from co-op student to entrepreneur". University of Waterloo.
- ^ "FAQ". Ground News. 2025. Archived from the original on September 17, 2025. Retrieved September 17, 2025.
- ^ Perez, Eric Balagtas; King, James; Watanabe, Yugo H.; Chen, Xiang 'Anthony' (October 20, 2020). "Counterweight: Diversifying News Consumption". Adjunct Publication of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. ACM. pp. 132–134. doi:10.1145/3379350.3416154. ISBN 978-1-4503-7515-3.
- ^ a b Bianchi 2025, p. 200.
- ^ "Rating System | Ground News". ground.news. October 17, 2025. Retrieved October 17, 2025.
- ^ a b c Di Licosa, Martina (September 14, 2025). "The Business of Balance". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
- ^ a b Bram 2024, p. 3.
- ^ Sun et al. 2024, p. 7.
- ^ Bram 2024, p. 9.
Bibliography
- Matthies, Brad (January 2022). "[Review of Ground News]". College & Research Libraries News. 83 (1): 42. doi:10.5860/crln.83.1.42.
- Bianchi, John (2025). "Automatic Evaluation of Online News Outlets' Reliability". In Hauff, Claudia; Macdonald, Craig; Jannach, Dietmar; Kazai, Gabriella (eds.). Advances in Information Retrieval. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 15576. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 197–203. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-88720-8_32. ISBN 978-3-031-88719-2. Retrieved September 17, 2025.
- Bram, Curtis (February 16, 2024). "Beyond partisan filters: Can underreported news reduce issue polarization?". PLOS ONE. 19 (2) e0297808. Bibcode:2024PLoSO..1997808B. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0297808. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 10871475. PMID 38363749.
- Sun, Lu; Zhang, Hengyuan; Liu, Enze; Liu, Mingyang; Vaccaro, Kristen (April 17, 2024). "NewsGuesser: Using Curiosity to Reduce Selective Exposure". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 8 (CSCW1): 1–22. doi:10.1145/3637376. ISSN 2573-0142.