News Aggregator Apps to Make your Opinions Unbiased

Bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses. – Tracy Morgan

A few days back, I came across a tweet asking, ‘Can design be used as a social good?’ Interestingly, social media algorithms create a bubble of information due to which our beliefs are even more strengthened.

Can AI algorithms be used to burst these bubbles – that too, political opinions? Well, some engineers and designers are precisely working on it. There are some pretty interesting news aggregator apps in the market to help you make well-rounded opinions of the events happening around you. To give you a sense of relief – Twitter is not on our list.

This blog covers some news apps which you may already know, while others are relatively new and definitely need your attention.

Best News Aggregator Apps

Flipboard

A platform where you can create and share digital magazines comprising your favorite stories. Flipboard is free, while stories from publishers like Reuters require separate subscriptions. You can read on technology, health, personal finance, politics, food, lifestyle, etc. It is one of the most popular news aggregator apps for discovering free quality articles. Though we don’t recommend Flipboard for political news.

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• Make your magazine public or private.
• You can customize any topic to build more personalized curation. For example: when I selected Health from ‘What’s your passion’ section, I could niche down further by choosing Genetics, nutrition, healthcare, etc., or can search for categories like Healthcare Technology not shown in tags.
• The top navbar includes thoughtful categories: For You, Daily Edition, Today’s picks, and What’s your passion.
• The UI is not bland. Typography will surely catch your attention. And the flip micro-transition when you scroll through different articles adds a degree of charm.
• The Explore section lets you follow stories specific to location – say Boston, Central Iowa, or Cleveland. This way, Flipboard provides a breath of filters and tags to curate magazines from global to local news.
• What if you forget to add an interesting story and can’t locate it among the sea of articles? The History feature saves you from this annoying problem.
• You can follow other people’s magazines, specific publications, or topics aligned with your curiosity.

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• The show-less of something feature doesn’t work well enough. It, then, becomes frustrating for users to repeatedly see the kind of stories they are least interested in.
• The recommendation algorithm tends to create silos of information that can skew the perspective – mainly on political news.

Price: Free

Ground News

News publishing houses often have biases toward political ideologies. Not comprehending counter-arguments for your views has serious consequences. As a result, citizens may get confused over advocating for right and just public policies. Ground News lets people know about the credibility and accuracy of the news topic.

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• The defining feature of this news app is you can know the sources of news stories you want to read – i.e., perspectives of various news agencies on the same piece of news. The sources are labeled as leaning to the right, center, or left. Their degree of factualness is also mentioned based on two independent news monitoring agencies. In the premium version, we can also know about the ownership of companies breaking the news. Whether those are media conglomerates, government-owned, independently run without the major influence of private companies, etc.
• Its AI algorithm itself creates a headline and summary for each event. The tone of voice of NLP generated summary is maintained to be neutral. But because data for the summary comes from the source articles, you can’t expect it to be neutral for all the topics.
• The ‘Top Stories’ feed doesn’t adjust topics algorithmically like on Instagram or Tik-Tok to hook you into its app.
• The blindspot feature lets you challenge your opinions as it lets you read topics majorly converging to one end of a political spectrum. Suppose your reading habit is inclined to left – to break your news bubble, you can go through the blindspot feed.
• Human beings are prone to various cognitive biases. It is always helpful to be aware of these biases. Once you create a profile on Ground News, you can assess your media bias from the ‘My News Bias’ feature. It is a kind of analytics that shows how many stories you read leaned to left, right or center, blindspots stories you went through, etc.
• Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could check the political leaning of your friends, journalists, or groups you follow on Twitter or Reddit? With Ground News, you can exactly do that. Go to settings, then blindspot tools, and just add Twitter or Reddit handle to see an overview of their profiles.

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• It aggregates news best on the USA, UK, and other crucial and popular global happenings. But when I tried to go hyper-local by selecting Delhi, India, I could see too few stories.

Price: Different pricing options are available. The most basic starts at $0.83/month and $9.99 per year.

Factual News

This news aggregator app is similar to Ground News. Like Ground News, it has many features to provide an unbiased, holistic view of global events. The app features the top 10 trending topics daily. Besides this, you can read about Health, Science, Sports Culture, etc.
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• For every topic, there is a list of sources or news agencies covering it. Alongside each source, you will see ‘Source bias’ – center, left, moderate left, etc., and overall ‘Grade’ for that particular article. The grade score is the average of four major parameters: News Outlet quality, Author’s expertise, quality of links and quotes, and tone of voice-neutral, opinionated or aggravating. You can further get more details on the grade report like the diversity of sources, unique links, etc.
• Any app is as good as its community. The discussion feature allows for lively engagement and useful insights. There are polls on which people can anonymously vote. They get to know about the context of questions in polls, comment, discuss and earn respect for their unique perspectives.
• Similar to Ground News, the stories and topics are not suggested based on our reading habits.
• In the premium version, you will receive the daily newsletter on trending topics and under-reported stories.
• It is crucial – particularly for news companies – to remain transparent and indicate the limitations of their AI algorithms. The Factual News team points out many reasons that may result in skewed grade scores on their website. One of these is articles with less than 250 words are not assessed. These vital bits of information surely enhanced my trust in them.
• Using its chrome extension, you can view the grade report of any article on the web.

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• Unlike Ground News, whose NLP algorithms create its unique summary. Factual News summarises the original articles, and that too just a couple of them.
• You will find some issues in the UI as well. Like scrolling up was not working in the version I installed. Another glaringly visible one was not being able to scroll the ‘Grade Report’ screen to click on the label ‘Read more about details.’ I had to move to the web app to see the full detailed Grade Report.
• Highlighting or bookmarking feature is missing. And it is too irritating when you have to spend 25 minutes to locate the story you wish to re-read or share. Personally, to save myself from this pain, I use a Pocket app – a simple bookmarking app made by the WordPress guys.

Price: $25/year for Annual subscription; $5/month

That ends the list of our best news aggregator apps. In today’s time, when our attention spans are shrinking and information overload fogs our brain, it is highly crucial to get our facts right. Lest we may get into the trap of propaganda with daring consequences of ending our entire human civilization. We hope you find some of these apps helpful and minimize your media or political bias.

Anyways, give us a chance to promote ourselves too. We are a team of skilled designers, developers, and project managers who breathe technology. Turn your idea into an amazing app with our mobile app development company.