What is the name of your solution?
Vngle: The Grassroots News Agency
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
A web3 news agency training creators to help newsrooms cover underserved communities. Think of us as the grassroots-powered Associated Press.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
We're solving how to best catalyze civic action to help grow a stronger, more equitable local news ecosystem through “grassroots reporting”. We’re combining creator reporting training, community organizing techniques, and blockchain forensics to empower local citizens to play roles in capturing underrepresented narratives across their communities, all while making it more affordable for newsrooms to expand their coverage capabilities. Our grassroots reporter training equips cross-cultural local experts with the skills needed to expand verified coverage across more underserved communities and grow awareness of how to spot misinformation.
Today, over 64% of American counties (over 2000 of 3143 counties) do not get original daily coverage. This results in an average of only 17% of news a community receives being original and locally relevant to it (Duke University). This leaves cities across America without an equitable voice and unable to catalog their cultural affairs. Plus, with the rise of Generative AI, the growth of misinformation and inauthentic media is filling these gaps at an alarming rate.
America’s local news ecosystem is in dire need of support. News desert studies show the United States alone lost over 2,100 local outlets, leaving millions of people having little to no access to daily original news on their area. Along with this, many local outlets have historically neglected minority communities, thus these growing news deserts have exacerbated the representation disparity faced by many underrepresented demographics. The demise of the centuries-old traditional news model and the industry's slowness in embracing new innovative approaches that cater to modern consumers are major factors that contribute to this climate. (Also, news deserts exist all across the globe, ranging from parts of Canada, Australia, Brazil, Africa, etc.)
The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research state that 95% of Americans identify misinformation as a problem when trying to access important information. This problem is quickly moving into videos with the growth of deep fakes. Misinformation, currently, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy and social media gatekeepers are only fueling echo chambers of content that is endorsed by one's social network, rather than verifiable facts.
Through training cross-cultural communities to mobilize awareness around their underrepresented affairs backed by public-ledger tools, we’re creating a transparent platform to capture neglected narratives and get them more distribution. Our target creator audiences are Gen-Z and Millennials in underrepresented communities, who are the most tech-savvy, socially conscious, and aware of misinformation, yet whose studies show ⅔ feel disconnected locally. They help power our reporting and ensure newsrooms get content they care about.
What is your solution?
Vngle is a web3 grassroots news agency. Our company name stands for “various angles'' and we serve as a decentralized nonpartisan newswire that trains diverse constituencies on how to capture verified video & photo insights to aid newsrooms in combating underrepresentation and misinformation. Think of us as a grassroots Associated Press that deploys patented web3 mobile forensics, cross-cultural reporter training, and social-organizing tactics to better catalog visual insights across underserved areas.
Through partnering with local experts and equipping them with UGC blockchain verification to capture stories, Vngle helps newsrooms & municipal entities expand their coverage capabilities by giving them access to a transparent record of exactly where, when, and how digital content originates across cities. Our mission is to help build a stronger local news & information ecosystem that better covers underrepresented geographies & brings a more equitable voice to all demographics through grassroots reporting.
We're mobilizing creators to help small-to-mid-sized newsrooms expand their coverage areas. After completing training, our vetted creators get step-by-step support from our editors on completing assignments. Our monthly newswire subscribers get access to our verified UGC sourced from trained local experts that capture the deeper narratives that newsrooms need. Our newswire helps newsrooms extend their content strategy at a fraction of the price of hiring personnel, all while ensuring they don't have to parachute into communities they don't know or that don't trust them. Newsrooms tap on us to get on-demand coverage of everything from local affairs to major events.
We systematize the process of gathering UGC, like "UBER for News". Rather than a patchwork of manual processes to source content themselves, with one request busy newsrooms get on-demand publish-ready content from the lens of trained local creators. Our differentiator is the trust we establish around UGC. We combine grassroots creator training and public ledger technology built with over half a million dollars of NSF cryptographic research to secure the provenance of content. Thus, we’re able to register content insights as immutable evidence, enabling newsrooms to pinpoint the exact origin of content to prove its authenticity and help mitigate misinformation.
We tackle geographic and demographic news deserts by deploying a gamified creator platform that equips locals with the skills needed to serve as reporters & editors for the areas they live in. We recruit all cross-cultural backgrounds across cities to ensure our coverage is equitable and authentically reflects the needs of all constituents.
Vngle’s innovation lies in our ability to create more granular local news without the traditional brick & mortar costs. By merging new tech, journalism, & people-powered social organizing techniques, we’re creating real-time sourcing & distribution of vetted information from across cities while bringing attention to pressing underrepresented matters through the lens of local residents.
We have a 6-step reporting process.
1. A Story request is created (by a newsroom).
2. Verified Creator is assigned.
3. Assignment is submitted.
4. Local Editorial Team Receives.
5. Content is Fact checked + Produced.
6. Content is Shared & Reporter is paid.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
At Vngle, diverse civically-minded locals who deeply care about the cross-cultural & political affairs that surround them, power our grassroots news. We empower them with deeper local insights & the ability to bring more attention to underrepresented geographic or demographic matters by equipping them with the news training needed to represent their areas.
Our starting target audiences are Gen-Z and Millennials in communities, who are the most socially conscious and tech-savvy, yet whom studies show ⅔ feel disconnected locally. By bringing grassroot reporting to underreported areas, Vngle is accelerating getting locals civically engaged and better informed on the hyper-local affairs around them. Through offering verifiable video-based grassroots coverage, we're winning over local trust in ways that traditional journalists "parachuting" into their communities aren't able to. Plus, we are becoming a beacon for broadcasting and preserving local cultural heritage.
The innovation behind Vngle’s approach lies in our ability to empower local citizens from all walks of life to work together to create more granular & authenticated cross-cultural local broadcast news for their city, all without the traditional brick & mortar costs. By merging blockchain technology, journalism, & people-powered social organizing techniques, we are creating real-time sourcing & distribution of vetted information from across cities while bringing attention to pressing underrepresented matters that you can only get through the lens of a local resident. Vngle expands the local news ecosystem and fills in the gaps that news deserts create by allowing the public to contribute to what is deemed newsworthy for their area. Through equipping the public with the skills and training needed to become reporters & editors, we serve as the people’s publisher, able to create new credible narratives for the underrepresented.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
We’ve built an amazing team of computer scientists, legal experts, cyber security/data professionals, and human-centered UX engineers that are helping fuel our progress as we pioneer in the web3 UGC verification space. Right now, we are a full minority lead organization. Our demographics range from Asian-American, Latin-American, African-American, Afro-Latino-American, to Indian-American, and we’re recruiting more perspectives. We value open-mindedness and recruit members representing all communities that we serve. Our work has earned MIT Solve’s Global Challenge Community Award for creating Antiracist Technology and a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis.
The power of our organization comes from our diverse points of view and ranging backgrounds. As the founder, I am an African American man, who’s the grandson of a Freedom Rider from the Civil Rights Movement & son of a City Councilman in Georgia. I intimately understand both the historical context and the modern-day issues communities face. I was raised seeing people from all walks of life who needed better representation. The idea to create Vngle was cemented after joining the NAACP to fight the injustices that were happening in Ferguson, MO, and discovering firsthand how the dangers of news deserts leave communities without a voice 1st hand. Working to address this problem eventually led me to become a Journalism Fellow at Stanford University & University of Southern California’s Starling Lab for Data Integrity, a Knight Foundation Fellow in the Executive Program for News Innovation and Leadership at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Journalism School, and serve on the Advisory Council of the Solutions Journalism Network.
Also, our technology patent, reporter training system, and 6+ years of dedicated work/research on this topic have uniquely qualified us to equip creators with forensic tools to capture immutable narratives that preserve the grassroots history of cities.
We’re empowering local creators from all walks of life to bolster journalistic infrastructure across areas lacking a traditional reporting backbone and support newsrooms in capturing more authenticated grassroots-level insights. More of the Vngle Leadership Team here: https://www.vngle.com/team/
As team lead I've dedicated myself to preparing to lead this venture. I've served as a Harvard Franklin Fellow for Social Impact x Tech, a Human-Centered Design Leader at the Columbia University Design Studio, an Oprah Winfrey International Leadership Fellow, and a Goldin Institute Global Fellow for international grassroots leadership. Fun fact: As a grad student at Columbia I did a 18-city self-funded study to learn the ins & outs of our grassroots reporting process. (I hold an MS in Strategic Communication from Columbia University, a BA in Economics from Morehouse College, and am a Software Engineering alum of the Flatiron School.)
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Help learners acquire key civic skills and knowledge, including how to assess credibility of information, engage across differences, understand one’s own agency, and engage with issues of power, privilege, and injustice.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Atlanta, Georgia
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Pilot: An organization testing a product, service, or business model with a small number of users
How many people does your solution currently serve?
We’ve trained dozens of creators already who’ve reported on 25+ cities across America. Thousands love our work thanks to our initiatives, events, and newsletter.
Why are you applying to Solve?
I'm applying because I see this as the ultimate opportunity to gain the comprehensive support my team needs to prepare for scale. Being involved with the MIT community will help us refine our city-by-city growth strategy and fill in our areas of lack. Our top focus area is growing our technical support to properly maintain our reporting ecosystem and have the bandwidth to host our growing inventory of content. Also, we want to join a cohort of other amazing global social entrepreneurs and gain a support group of peers solving the world's biggest challenges. Though Vngle's focus right now is bringing verifiable grassroots news coverage to the United States, we have eventual international ambitions to support other countries striving to address news deserts. This opportunity would help give me access to the network I need to jumpstart that process.
Personally, I’m seeking to perfect my leadership to scale our content newswire to support more newsrooms. As a Solver, I hope to grow and to further understand how to navigate the business decisions needed to offer our services across America. Gaining access to mentorship and coaching from across MIT, especially from the Media Lab, will help me fully realize the vision for the world's first fully transparent blockchain-based grassroots news agency. With this, I want to create better systems to evaluate our growth and make our impact transparent. Plus, the national stage that comes with this opportunity would help solidify Vngle's presence as we aim to bring nonpartisan coverage to America's battleground states to help combat misinformation and underrepresentation before the 2024 Presidential election.
As a member of this cohort, I seek to represent a new era of ethically-minded leadership whose methods are not only innovative but sustainable in supporting real lasting change. As a Solver, I will seek to help usher in a new era of more equitable and verified hyper-local news reporting to help set American cities free from the grips of polarization, to move us towards having the hard and honest conversations around our collective local conditions needed to sow back the social fabric of the United States (and eventually beyond).
Vngle’s biggest barriers will be more internal than external and will center around building the team bandwidth to support city-by-city scalability. To get ahead of this, we’re building a world-class news & media network to best establish relationships well before we enter a new area to position our revenue model for success as we grow. Externally, we're focusing on creating a solid community connection & expansion strategy to help fuel our awareness, creator sign-ups, recruitment, etc. Partner-wise, we will have to create a robust plan to attract both notably large & micro-influencers to work with us as we grow in new cities. We believe by continuing to partner with other social impact-oriented people and organizations, we will drastically increase our growth/reach/impact.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Blake Stoner
What makes your solution innovative?
The innovation behind Vngle’s approach lies in our ability to empower local citizens from all walks of life to work together to create more granular cross-cultural news coverage on their city, all without the traditional brick & mortar costs. By merging web3 technology, journalism, & people-powered community organizing techniques, we are creating real-time sourcing & distribution of vetted information from across cities while bringing attention to pressing underrepresented matters that you can only get through the lens of a local resident. Our training combines grassroots organizing and our patented blockchain technology to help source verified hyper-local insights to strengthen the local news ecosystem.
Vngle expands the local news ecosystem and fills in the gaps that news deserts create by allowing the vetted members of the general public to contribute to newsworthy assignments for their area. By building a network of local experts that are trained & equipped with digital infrastructure to capture verified storytelling content, we’re helping newsrooms gain the content to expand their digital coverage capabilities at a fraction of the price of sending traditional personnel. Our decentralized tools help cultivate new possibilities for communities to be empowered, especially those that are underserved. These tools enable individual stakeholders, especially those vulnerable to abuse/negligence from centralized authorities to take ownership of their data and storytelling while proving its authenticity.
Within the media landscape, not much thought is given to cryptography and its expanded usage to pinpoint the origin of content. While the term “blockchain” is known, knowledge of its applications beyond cryptocurrency and NFTs is limited. Blockchain, with its unique features of distributed registry systems, is perfect for establishing proof of stake, as well as embedding pertinent information about that proof to whoever requests it. Applied to journalism, this has an impact on the verification of media IP rights and fact-checking. By embedding a media’s hash (a unique fingerprint) and forensic information on a publicly-accessible register, fact-checkers can have instant access to an array of knowledge about the created media, as well as sufficient proof of the definitive originator of said media.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
Our impact goals are focused on growing our community-building efforts, local trainings, and partnerships to increase our impact.
We’re soon launching our first state-wide initiative in Georgia with backing from Stanford & USC’s Starling Lab for Data Integrity. We’re working to catalog healthcare disparities to curate new data for newsrooms and policy across the CDC’s backyard. With Starling, our team also started a research project with Georgia Tech to create an industry standard process around how citizens can identify & contribute immutable information to help mitigate the spread of misinformation / manipulated information.
Recently, Vngle won Columbia Journalism School's Brown Institute Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology and will be working with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the J-School to develop how our healthcare coverage can be replicated across more of America. We seek to bring our work to the 2024 battleground states before the first post-pandemic Presidential Election.
Over the next five years, we seek to expand our coverage topic areas and bring our work to international communities as well. We're partnering with the Goldin Institute, a global NGO that trains grassroots leaders across 40+ countries, to leverage our training & technology to help source hyper-local stories that are largely missed by international media.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
Measuring the number of pressing underreported stories covered:
At Vngle, we’re shifting the narrative surrounding what’s happening in underrepresented parts of America, and by doing so we’re telling the untold stories that are hidden from the public & creating levels of accountability around them too.
Measuring the number of grassroots reporters trained per community:
We’re building a consistent journalistic backbone for these communities, many of which have gone unheard, forgotten, or inadequately served for too long. Through our verifiable grassroots approach, we are ensuring every community is heard and their culture is transparent.
Measuring the number of stories distributed by publishers per city:
By equipping locals to take control of the journalistic process in a vetted way, their communities will get more real-time, ultra-authentic, and in-depth comprehensive coverage that’s inclusive of people from all walks of life. We seek to ensure truly cross-cultural coverage enables these areas to share their realities with a broader regional community and build local momentum around granular hyper-local topics.
Through this, Vngle serves as an avenue for verifiable stories that cut through the noise and help the public engage with deeper local insights that would normally be swept under the rug.
What is your theory of change?
We’re bringing new levels of truth & transparency to communities by uplifting all angles of local stories that are backed by verifiable credentials. By creating new public sources of truth, we aim to help set America free from the grips of polarization, to move us towards having the hard & honest conversations needed to address the top civic-driven collective issues of today. Through effectively organizing cross-cultural perspectives around pressing topics, we are shedding light on underrepresented matters in communities across America.
City by city, we are combatting the clickbait alternative facts that are fueling our divides. Our focus is on sharing “various angles” to ensure no voice is louder than another. For too long the tactics to suppress the public by drowning their voices out have been used to silence perspectives. Through grassroots reporting, we’re leveraging new technology to offer a faster approach to sourcing and distributing honest stories that many organizations miss out on. Vngle is taking a new direction in the media landscape by actually empowering communities and highlighting their unique needs and cultures. To do such we’re equipping locals with the grassroots knowledge and storytelling skills needed to take their narrative into their own hands. Through blockchain, we’re able to make the process completely verifiable for the public, all while cutting many traditional brick & mortar costs.
We’re strong believers that decentralized technologies can play a huge role in addressing the major disparities around representation and verification in modern news coverage. I started Vngle to address the startling news desert trend across America, where large patches of the nation get little to no coverage. These “news deserts” are where misinformation thrives, accelerated by social media channels acting as echo chambers. Today’s news trends are a danger to our society and continue a legacy of neglectful coverage that’s robbed so many cross-cultural communities of a proper narrative. We started Vngle to help bring a journalistic backbone to these underreported areas by crafting decentralized infrastructure to better support media entities in capturing more verified grassroots-level insights. Thus, giving an equitable voice to underrepresented affairs, and creating new public records to combat the origins of local misinformation.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Vngle leverages patented public ledger technology to authenticate and verify submitted original videos and photos curated by trained grassroots creators. Our work builds on $550,000 of NSF-sponsored computer science and cyber-security research focused on using blockchain tools to secure the provenance and forensic proof of videos/photos. We integrate public verifiability into the content captured, adding credibility to the origin of local news sources, and giving credence to where, when, and how the information originated. Our technology is designed to implement a privacy-preserving way to capture digital evidence. Through the preservation of forensic properties of news content on an immutable digital ledger, we can offer detailed proofs of the origin of media, making the proofs immutable and publicly available for all users including newsroom editors and the general audience. Having the ability to verify provenance, adds to the credibility of the news story which is the first step in achieving trust.
This technology works to prevent the dissemination of manipulated media that are identifiable as deep and shallow fakes, which are becoming increasingly common. Through this blockchain layer, news consumers are able to fact-check the origin and authenticity of the news we capture across our network.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
https://www.vngle.com
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
Full-time: 1 Part-time: 9
How long have you been working on your solution?
Over 6 years. We started exploring the concept in late 2016, began testing our reporting process in 2018, and built our reporting platform MVP in 2020.
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
At Vngle, we're all about inclusion and seeing communities from "various angles". Through training citizens to become local reporters and editors, our operation is predicated on digital civic literacy. By bringing more equitable grassroots-level news to underrepresented areas, we're driving new local engagement and spurring economic opportunity in underreported areas by covering local businesses, local culture, and local affairs. We're furthering local digital equity in underserved communities through local partnerships, collaborations, and direct grassroots engagement with partners who impact all walks of life. We're driving this forward by ensuring citizens have the technology they need (smartphones and computers for reporting/editing), ensuring they have access to the internet (or helping them find connectivity), and creating quality training content for digital literacy (e.g., skills needed to leverage technology in representing their community).
Our work brings coverage to people of all backgrounds across communities, being fully representative of all genders, races, sexual orientations, and disabilities. Through our work, we're expanding the local news ecosystem and curating collective conversations around unique underrepresented pressing topics in cities. By pairing our content coverage with verifiable local dialog we're better engaging, listening, and learning from communities across the United States. In doing so, we're unveiling current and historical root causes behind localized issues and highlighting what resources and support are needed to address them moving forward.
We mold our work around 2 main principles to ensure everyone grows as holistic civic citizens:
Having Radically Open-minded Respect.
To properly bring attention to the needs of diverse communities, I challenge my team to leave their biases behind. Our culture is all about working together to understand our fellow human beings better, by never assuming we know their experiences or what’s best for them. This idea permeates through our team dynamics, allowing us to have immense respect for the perspectives of our team members and the communities we serve. Because of this, we have created a non-hierarchical culture that has enabled a community of industry veterans and students to work together to build new solutions and overcome obstacles through a collective cross-generational knowledge base.
Being a Champion of Service.
Having a bonafide passion for the work of developing more informed communities is the bedrock of team building at Vngle. We seek to be all-star public servants. We have a cultural notion that we’re seeking to win the “championship of service”. To do so, we look for impactful performers with strong initiative who are extraordinarily compassionate and move with urgency.
What is your business model?
Our Services:
Grassroots Newswire (monthly & on-demand access to our inventory of grassroots content for newsrooms) https://www.vngle.com/services...
Creative Content Services (enabling entities to leverage our expertise to craft local media tactics for non-profits, local businesses, governments, etc): https://www.vngle.com/services...
New Media Workshops (operational sessions to learn the latest trends in web3 & beyond): https://www.vngle.com/services...
Our path to sustainability is focused on rolling out a multi-tier monetization model and crafting value-added bundle packages for clients. Our Grassroots Newswire serves as our key long-term revenue avenue, enabling newsrooms to gain content to expand their digital coverage capabilities at a fraction of the price of hiring staff to cover the same areas we do. We’re focusing on historically neglected areas that would otherwise go unrepresented. In doing so, newsrooms subscribe to access our inventory of locally created content, and the creators in our network get paid to capture assignments.
Our Creative Content Strategy & New Media Workshop services have helped bootstrap our operation and now serve as value-add consulting services to bolster our newswire. Through such, we collect revenue from entities focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) to enable them to play roles in sponsoring community-centric content that brings coverage to underrepresented areas and curates local insights to aid social services, government agencies, etc. We also seek grants to support our operations as well.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
Our target market is small to midsize newsrooms that need help expanding their coverage across underrepresented areas. Rather than hire full-time staff that usually parachute into communities, they use our network to source genuine local insights across cities. Publishers, media organizations, and more, constantly need access to the inventory of authenticated location-based insights and granular grassroots content we're collecting. Simultaneously, we’re helping residents in our reporting network get paid to engage their communities to surface pressing stories needing more circulation.
We’re already making revenue. Our path to sustainability is focused on rolling out a multi-tier revenue model by launching complimentary services and crafting value-added bundle packages for clients. Our on-demand newswire content services enable media and news organizations to take advantage of our content access they can't get elsewhere. There is no news agency to help with hyper-local coverage. As a decentralized grassroots news agency, we are able to galvanize the people power and technology needed to securely capture local insights in areas without traditional journalistic infrastructure. In doing so, we made it our mission to help newsrooms combat misinformation & underrepresentation.
Our advocates range from news, grassroots, to web3 communities, and we’re bringing them all together to help usher in a new level of verified reporting to America’s most underreported areas. Newsroom leaders love us so much, they are telling their networks about us. Because of our network now, we believe we’re now only 1 to 2 degrees of connection away from the majority of newsrooms in America. This passion & connectivity is growing similarly with the grassroots & web3 folks.
We see our services becoming a market leader, especially in historically neglected media areas that are urban, rural, and economically struggling. In many of these markets, we would be the sole local news generator. Our decentralized infrastructure makes it easier to bring deeper and more verifiable equitable coverage to any area. Because of the expedient nature of a decentralized news platform, we are able to rapidly fact-check and address counterfactual narratives that are often generated within news cycles.
Having done reporting across America, the trust around our brand expertise has created differentiation around our services as we grow our presence. With this, we are building deep civic partnerships and a community of grassroots leaders to help us grow in our target cities. These local leaders know their districts and serve a vital role in ushering in better news to cover what’s happening. For example, one State Senator felt Georgia needed verifiable nonpartisan coverage so much, he offered his office at the Capitol to use as a base.
We leverage these community-building tactics to find areas of underrepresentation to better cover insights for newsrooms. We work with passionate local citizens in target areas to devise cross-cultural grassroots marketing tactics that resonate through hosting town halls, local events, discussions, etc. We also focus on attracting local influencers, these are mission-aligned advocates and civically-minded people with large local followings. For example: teachers, religious leaders, barbers, etc.
Solution Team
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AR
Alex Rhodd Vngle -
Blake Stoner Founder & Chief Reporter, Vngle: The Grassroots News Agency
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Vngle: The Grassroots News Agency