Ground News 12+

Great news app for getting the full picture

Ground News has a lot of helpful tools to help you understand the full story rather than being stuck with a particular narrative. My favourite features are the Blindspot Report, which shows you news stories that weren’t covered by particular sections of the political spectrum, and the Media Conglomerate tags, which show you which news outlets are owned by certain companies and allow you to see the spin they are applying as a group to a certain event. Would recommend to anyone looking to get different viewpoints and a more rounded view of the world’s events.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, thanks for the 5-star review! We’re glad to hear that you’re enjoying the Blindspot Report and find that Ground is helping you get different viewpoints of today’s news. If you ever have any suggestions about how we might improve your experience, please don’t hesitate to let our team know – all community feedback is used to inform future improvements.

Needs a Built in Reeder

Very good idea, executed very well and delivers on the anti-biased approach.
However, it is an inconvenience to have to open safari when wanting to read any article. I realise it would be a massive task to develop and impliment an article reader within the app but ti woulkd make it the whole package.
Or at least allow external support for other reader apps.

Overall fantastic, with some minor tweaks required.

There is good and bad, but overall, a brilliant mission, well worth your subscription.

The good:

1. The core mission of the app is brilliant, this is a true service to humanity. Misinformation and political bias in news media is a problem so vast that most don’t really understand the true impact it’s having on our society. I deeply applaud the underlying goal of Ground News.

2. Paid service rather than free with advertising. To me this is the single biggest reason (after the first point) why I signed up, and would be the single reason to immediately delete my account, should this ever change. In the short term, it’s totally understandable that a free service would generate more initial users, but the longer term success of a free service is dependant on ongoing ‘clicks’; which directly incentivises the spread of misinformation. Being a paid service means that Ground News already have my money, so they don’t have any incentive but to RETAIN that subscription. In other words, they have no incentive but to make the best app possible.

2. The scope of stories and outlets pulled into the app is shocking, in a good way. I’m yet to find a single media outlet that isn’t pulled in, even my local town newspaper is on there. This is truly a central source of the news of our world.

3. The general layout, functionality and design of the app is well considered, and makes a lot of logical sense. It’s easy to find and search for specific topics, trends, outlets, and even geolocations.

4. The ability to compare bias between outlets and even see who owns them outlets offers great insight to the user.

5. The blindspot is by far my favourite feature. It clearly demonstrates in a simple way to the user, just how different the reporting is across the political spectrum, and viewing this information definitely drives the user to be more conscious of what they take as fact, or take at face value, without further research.

The bad:

1. There is no way to set ‘’center” (least biased) and high factuality as the defaults. You can set them per story each time, but not save them as defaults. Whenever you click on a story, stories are always listed showing left learning articles at the top. This gives a slightly sour impression that Ground News is itself a left learning organisation, which somewhat defeats the mission of the app. To be clear, I don’t get that impression at all from the app, but I can see how some users would interpret that way. Sometimes articles with low factuality are listed first too. By default the least biased (center) and most factual stories should be top of the list, and the user then should have the option to change these defaults should they desire.

2. This is a minor one, but every time i open the app on desktop it defaults to the same size window, rather than keeping the window size of the previous session. This is a bit frustrating when using on a larger or higher res monitor, as some of the app details are not visible until you expand the window, meaning I need to drag and expand the window every time I open the app.

3. Although there definitely seems to be a very wide selection of stories, even though i am based in the UK and selected UK when signing up, the majority of stories displayed to me without actively searching are US based news.

Overall, highly recommended to all humans of planet earth.