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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
[edit]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
[edit]The 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
[edit]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." Ground News describes far-left publications as liberal.[7]
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] As examples, Ground News uses this method to rate CNN as "left-leaning", the Associated Press as "center", and Fox News as "right-leaning".[10]
While the bias ratings can be accessed with a free account, Ground News also provides factuality ratings behind a paywall.[6]
Blindspot
[edit]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
[edit]Promotion of Ground News heavily relies on social media marketing through sponsorship of YouTubers. Martina di Licosa of the Columbia Journalism Review noted that these promoters span political beliefs, from left-wing commentator Adam Conover to a far-right commentator known for tweeting antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ content.[8]
Reception
[edit]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
[edit]- ^ a b Roberts, Joni; Drost, Carol (2022). "Internet Reviews". College & Research Libraries News. 83 (1): 42. doi:10.5860/crln.83.1.42.
- ^ a b c d e Mateos, Evelyn (14 April 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 18 December 2024. Retrieved 9 April 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' (2020-10-20). "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. 2025-10-17. Retrieved 2025-10-17.
- ^ a b c Di Licosa, Martina (September 14, 2025). "The Business of Balance". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 14 September 2025.
- ^ a b Bram 2024, p. 3.
- ^ Sun et al. 2024, p. 7.
- ^ Bram 2024, p. 9.
Bibliography
[edit]- 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 2025-09-17.
- Bram, Curtis (2024-02-16). "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 (2024-04-17). "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.