<aside> đź“Ś Vngle is a grassroots reality news network curating more comprehensive & verifiable insights for local communities. We give locals the training & tools needed to create a more diverse news ecosystem for their area.

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TL; DR

Vngle is a Georgia-based social imp act startup that aims to fill in the local news void happening at many cities across the United States (and the world) through a decentralized, hyper-local reality news platform where vetted citizen journalists can create and publish authentic and comprehensive stories for their local community.

At Vngle, I lead the design and development of:

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Background

In today’s connected digital age, people have access to more news than ever before — government decisions, celebrity scandals, national protests — all delivered through news channels and the internet to everyone’s devices. Yet credible and comprehensive local news that builds the foundation for social cohesion, grassroots political activism, and community identity is disappearing. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this process.

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A consequence of the expanding news deserts is the shift toward social media to discover and consume news. While this clearly has contributed to political polarization, increased misinformation, and other negative side-effects, it also led to the rise of online influencers and content creators as well as online communities that leverage the World Wide Web to propagate information across seams.

Vngle's Role

While mainstream, professional newspapers may not be reporting areas around the United States, another form of journalism has been often neglected by the public, but has the potential to help fill in the news gap — Citizen Journalism.

In the past, citizen or grassroots journalism commonly has a bad reputation for being unprofessional, biased, or unethical. Vngle's goal is to create a journalism platform that

  1. Democratize journalism so more members of our community can contribute to providing the pulse of their local community.
  2. Provide a standard for grassroots journalism that enables journalists to provide authentic, credible, and comprehensive stories.

Problem

<aside> ❓ How might we fill the local news gap within under-covered areas so that individuals are more connected with the pulse of their communities and each other’s perspectives?

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Solution

This is an ambitious goal. The first step toward this goal is to amplify the company's online presence by designing a landing page that grabs visitor attention & encourages engagement. Furthermore, since the company headquarter city, College Park, Georgia, is also a news desert city with a large African American population whose stories are underreported, we wanted to launch our first College Park city front page where all of our grassroots reporter stories on College Park are posted, along with relevant local news from mainstream media.

My Role

After joining the team as the first software engineer, I took on the role of technology lead and worked with the team to build the company landing page and the College Park front page.