Blake Stoner is a grassroots reporter, social entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast with a history of community advocacy. After working on over 10 grassroots campaigns, he noticed many communities across the United States of America needed more representation to highlight their culture and concerns. He believes that an important challenge to address right now is the growing crisis of news deserts that disproportionately leave communities of color ill-represented and uninformed. In response, he founded Vngle, a grassroots news network which provides an equitable decentralized approach to local reporting and brings nonpartisan coverage to underreported geographic and demographic areas. Through a gig-economy model, it verifies and trains local citizens with smartphones to serve as reporters and editors. Through scaling, Vngle seeks to make verifiable news mainstream, where anyone can check the origin of where, when, & how stories are captured through a public ledger.