Editorial Standards

What we publish (and what we don't)

The Balanced News does not break original news. We do not employ correspondents, conduct interviews, or publish press releases. What we publish is analysis — bias scoring, sentiment analysis, coverage-gap identification, and editorial commentary on how other outlets are covering the same story.

Every article page on this site is a multi-source analysis of reporting that first appeared elsewhere. We credit the original outlets in every analysis (see any article page's “How N sources covered this story” table), link back to their primary coverage, and use the AnalysisNewsArticle schema type so search engines correctly classify our work as analysis, not original reporting.

Source selection

We continuously aggregate from 50+ Indian news publishers across the political spectrum — including The Hindu, Indian Express, Times of India, Hindustan Times, NDTV, Republic TV, Zee News, India Today, The Wire, OpIndia, The Print, Swarajya, and major regional-language outlets. We deliberately include outlets across left, center, and right editorial positions because the product is comparison.

Sources are added based on (1) circulation or digital reach, (2) representation across the political spectrum, and (3) consistent original reporting. We periodically remove sources that stop reporting or become indistinguishable from another source in our index. The live list of active sources is reflected in each article's “N sources” count.

How we detect bias

Every article we ingest is analysed by a machine-learning pipeline that assigns three scores:

• Political inclination on a left/center/right spectrum (0–100 for each), based on word choice, framing, source selection, and attribution patterns.
• Sentiment (0–100, negative → neutral → positive), measuring the emotional tone of the coverage.
• Lens Score (0–100), a composite of public-interest signals and coverage-gap metrics that identifies stories mainstream media is underreporting relative to their public importance.

For a detailed walkthrough of the bias detection methodology, see How Bias Detection Works. For the Lens Score methodology, see What is Lens Score.

AI disclosure — what is machine-generated vs. human-written

The Balanced News runs two distinct production pipelines. Article analysis pages (at /<category>/<uuid>/…) and the analytical content on the home feed are generated by machine learning models, without per-article human authorship. This includes the balanced multi-source summary, the bias-score reasoning, the sentiment reasoning, the Lens Score components, the accountability-indicator identification, and the source comparison tables. These pages are published under The Balanced News editorial oversight and carry the organisation — not a named individual — as author in the structured data.

The long-form essays in our Insights section, the explainers in How It Works, and the policy pages (this one, the corrections policy, about) are written by named human editors on our team. These pages carry individual authorship and use the standard BlogPosting schema with a Person author.

We draw this line deliberately. Attaching a human byline to machine-generated content would misrepresent who produced it. Keeping long-form editorial separate preserves the value of our named editors' work and makes the distinction clear to readers and search engines.

Editorial oversight

Machine-generated article analyses are published continuously as source coverage is ingested. The Balanced News editorial team monitors outputs in aggregate — reviewing flagged stories, checking bias-score distributions, and spot-checking randomly selected analyses — rather than approving each one individually. When issues are found, the model or rules are tuned and affected stories re-scored.

When our analysis of a specific story is flagged as incorrect — by a source outlet, a reader, or internal review — we investigate and re-score. If the analysis changes materially, the updated version replaces the previous one and the article's dateModified reflects the change. See Corrections Policy for the full process.

Accountability flags

When our analysis identifies an accountability dimension in a story (financial irregularity, abuse of power, systemic failure, cover-up attempted, sexual misconduct, electoral malpractice, rights violation, public safety issue, environmental violation), that flag is surfaced on the article page with a plain-language explanation. These flags reflect what the source coverage alleges, not independent verification by The Balanced News. We do not investigate claims; we surface them.

Corrections

See our Corrections Policy for how we handle errors, response times, and how to contact us.

Independence

The Balanced News is published by Ambasync Solution Pvt Ltd, founded by Ojas Kale. We do not accept editorial direction from advertisers, sponsors, political parties, or media partners. Advertising on our pages is served programmatically; ad placement has no influence on bias scoring, coverage selection, or Lens Score calculation.

If you see content that suggests otherwise, please tell us.