Ground News

I’ve been able to almost entirely eliminate commercials and advertising from my day-to-day. One vexing source remains: YouTube. Vexing because, not just commercials between videos, but commercial interruptions (often abruptly timed), and now content providers are promoting products during their videos.

Several of the YouTubers I follow and regard have been promoting Ground News, a different kind of news feed that features bias indicators for each article. It sounded interesting, and I thought I’d give it a try.

Unfortunately, I found it disappointing. And kind of lame.

The first problem is that I wanted a news feed, Ground News is a news portal. There are no full articles, just ledes or some Ai-generated bullet points (which are themselves a sore point I’ll get to). If you actually want to read the news story, you have to click through to the site with the story.

And the onslaught of ads that implies. Most commercial websites today are garbage dumps of advertising. (Right out of Idiocracy, an absurd comedy that seems more of a documentary every day.) News outlets are especially polluted, so clicking through — no, I’ll pass.

Which right there makes Ground News almost useless to me. The only news I get from it is headlines and snippets. This point alone is enough to ensure I won’t renew my subscription.

It isn’t just that the value I see in Ground News is so low. It’s that I have a sense that even in the context of what they do, they don’t do it very well. The Ai-generated bullet points — the count is always three, like the Holy Hand Grenade — often are redundant (same thing in all three) or weirdly irrelevant.

The feed itself seems incompetent to me in several ways. I assume an Ai must be behind these gems:

Kilauea erupting tagged with Trump, and a Trump story tagged with Barack Obama. I can’t even see how the Ai made these connections. These snaps also show the bias bar that accompanies each item. It supposedly rates the bias of the article based (I believe) only on nature of the sources. The dots below indicate multiple sources you can horizontally scroll through to see their headlines. (All you get in these is headlines.)

I should point out these weren’t next to each other in the feed. I’ve been saving up goodies for this post, and to save space, I’ve paired up the individual screen grabs. But no connection in the pairing other than some mild thematic connections in my mind.

Here again, the tagging seems way off the mark. I can see a tenuous connection — associating Trump with Hunter Biden’s trouble does seem secretly a bit on the nose. (And tagging the Trump story above with Barack Obama would be funny if it was some passive-aggressive behavior of the Ai.)

How is a NASA story tagged with Europe? (I take some issue with the word “accidentally” in the headline, but that’s another story.) And what do iPhones have to do with the horror story on the right? (As I recall, they were a factor only in that the 12-year-old was annoyed at her phone time being interrupted by the 8-year-old, but tagging the story with iPhones is… weird.)

Also, hope you like that image of the top of a police car because they use it every time there’s a crime-related story of any kind and they don’t have a directly related photo. Which is often enough that you’ll see the image above a lot. Likewise, some other images.

Speaking of which, that image on the left. Any item related to hospitals or injury uses it. Apparently, in the “mind” of some Ai, a cliff-jumping accident by a college athlete is Traffic News.

Sometimes the connection is hard to see, but one can sort of understand linking Michael Madsen with Quentin Tarantino. One cannot see what connection Tarantino might have with the news event, though. I assume the movies Madsen has done came up in passing, and Tarantino’s name was mentioned.

More tagging errors. One might assume Pelosi was somehow mentioned in these (unrelated) stories, but she can’t have been instrumental let alone deserving of a tag on the story. How is it not the obvious tags of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

And some people wonder why I’m so thoroughly underwhelmed by Ai.

That certainly isn’t Cornel West pictured (and I think I can assume Mr. West wouldn’t care for the association). I know what happened here. RFK, Jr. wanted off the Wisconsen ballot, so that’s the link. But, wow, what editorial incompetence. As the old saying goes, it takes a computer to really screw things up.

And what in the world do stunt planes have to do with Opera Philadelphia tickets?

As fun as these are, the bigger point is I could give you dozens or hundreds more. This inability to tag articles is endemic. I assume there is very little human oversight. (If there is, then these are even more depressing.)

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Supposedly, you can partition your feed into primary categories such as Politics or Local News. But my experience with these has been disappointing. Not surprising given the endemic tagging errors. You get roughly the same set of stories regardless of which category you use:

The top politics story is from Majorca and doesn’t sound like politics. My top Local News story is that Biden dropped out of the race? This is incompetent.

Ground News is incompetent.

I’ve mentioned the three Ai-generated bullet points. If you click one of these headline panels in the feed, depending on where you click, it takes you to the news platform with the article or to a Ground News summary. Those come in two flavors: a lede from one of the news platforms or the three Ai-generated bullet points.

For example:

Do those sound like sensible bullet point for that headline? How are any of them “inside” Biden’s decision? And what is this “A Congressperson” stuff? When did the news stop naming names?

I’d click the “Something wrong?” link, but I don’t think they’d appreciate exactly what I think is wrong.

The first bullet just restates the headline, the second is at least on point (although hardly news), and the third mostly repeats the first while being unspecific about the timing.

I just can’t call this incoherent crap news. These bullet point summaries have no substance.

A recent one was actually incoherent. The headline was “Harris trolls Trump at Vegas rally and LA fundraiser, says her crowds are ‘pretty big'”. The first bullet point just restates that headline. The second one, though: “Harris stated Trump upset people by saying they left his rallies early due to his speeches, reflecting this in her campaign.” WTF? Dangling vagueness all over that one. Yikes.

What I’d hoped for based on the avid descriptions of YouTubers (who were probably reading a script and don’t use the product) was a curated news feed. This is just someone leveraging Ai to make a buck, and it has almost no value to me. All it provides for me is headlines.

Recently, Ground News added a new wrinkle:

I mean the bronze banner boldly across the feed (lower half of image above). It’s there at the top of the feed when you open the app. It annoys me. Takes up space, and I’ll hit those exact headlines as I scroll down. And, as usual, the Ai behind it has weird taste in “Headlines”. The banner has no value to me, I don’t want it there, but there’s no setting to turn it off.

One more mark on the con side. On the pro side… crickets.

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My bottom line is that I find what Ground News does useless. What’s the point, really? It seems a solution in search of a problem. We all know the news today is biased, divisive, and low in quality (and class). I think most know which way various outlets lean. Adding a gauge below a headline has no added value for me.

It’s not as if Ground News was combining the stories or actually doing anything with them. Other than letting an Ai get things wrong.

What’s vaguely interesting (although I don’t know how valuable) is when the gauge shows no reporting from the Left or Right (as the case may be). Ground News has a “Blindspot” category for when the Left or Right ignores a story the other side, or centralist sources, reports. But the categorizing here is just as bad as for the general topics. For instance:

Among other things, this panel shows the Blindspot indicator. Note how it covers the topic tag that usually appears there. I call that bad design. What’s not apparent is that this didn’t come from the Blindspot category but my general feed. Which makes the Blindspot category as useless as the topic categories.

That’s a key annoyance. The app keeps showing me the same damn stories over and over. The supposedly topic-specific categories are polluted with off-topic stories — the same stories from the general and other category feeds.

The sloppy work is apparent also in that Blindspot articles aren’t always so blind. I’ve seen articles tagged Blindspot but with a reasonable fraction of stories from the side supposedly ignoring it. Makes the Blindspot category even more useless to me.

The thing is: this is the one thing Ground News does. It categorizes news stories.

Very badly.

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There is a deeper subject here. I don’t want meta-news. I don’t find any value in it (especially done this badly). I want plain old-fashioned journalism. Which may be a vain hope these days. Journalism has gone from being a joke to being an actual blight on democracy (and sensibility).

Why can’t we have just news. What happened to journalism? On some level, it’s terrible to me that something like Ground News could even be a thing.

As a bit of an aside, the news headline above illustrates part of the problem. “News outlets struggles for visuals.” Because news is reduced to images. One more step into a cartoon world. (And look what that’s brought us, a cartoon villain.)

That image of President Biden has appeared three times in just the screen grabs presented here. Imagine how old it gets in the feed. Along with that “Emergency” picture, that police lightbar picture, and one of a gavel they use for legal stories.

My bottom line: The news is bad enough, but Ground News adds nothing of value to me. It’s just a badly done portal to ad-bloated news websites.

Cons: All. Pros: None.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, tonight we get to watch CBS completely abdicate moderating the VP debate at a time when moderation is most needed. It’s both spineless and because they want a fireworks show.

“Journalism” these days is utterly gutless because they’re afraid of losing access. They don’t seem to realize that [A] that’s a story and [B] it frees them to report honestly.

I ask myself over and over: how did our culture become so damn stupid?

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Stay journalistic, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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