That Year In America
Happy Birthday, VNN!
Verified News Community! Can you believe it? Today’s our birthday.
VNN turns 4 years old today. We’re celebrating all week. Today, on our official birthday, we bring you TYIA.
A little different from our TMIA “This Month In America”. We’re talking “That Year In America”, looking back at the entire last year of local news and information.
But can we start off with a shout out to you, our Verified News Community?!
More than 25K of you viewed Verified News 47K times.
You watched our videos more than 60K times! Nearly 2K hours.
As a Muscogee Creek citizen owned business, VNN was dedicated to expanding Indigenous perspective in our reporting this year. VNN President and Kelly Tidwell says that dedication will only increase in the future.
We’re accepting birthday donations all this week! Will you help us hit $500?
We also shared several stories about the April Wilkens case, which now has its own podcast series in Oklahoma.
And we brought you news and information about Freedmen in Oklahoma, focusing in on one severely neglected abandoned Freedmen cemetery.
VNN New York’s Rocky Brown shared so much empowering news for the Black community in Broome County this year, from fun community events to the positive impacts small businesses and entrepreneurs are having in the area.
And in Michigan, Rachael Schuit moved from Traverse City to the City of Grand Rapids.
Following her move, Rachael reported on the shooting of Patrick Lyoya and the officer charged with his murder as well as how community organizations are working to make things like pet ownership more inclusive.
VNN also took part in some big projects this year.
Most recently, we teamed up with Big If True to put on a “From Adversity To Entrepreneurship” Learning Series. This months-long effort explored the benefits and barriers of overcoming adversity to start a business.
We held a voter information and registration event for Muscogee Creek Nation citizens, took part in TWO journalism outreach programs, The Indie Growth Program and Trusting News’ Low Trust In News.
And let’s not forget the wildest thing we did this year: representing Verified News Network on The Blox, a reality TV show entrepreneurship competition, streaming now.
That’s where we met Elevate Holistics, our biggest sponsor of news last year through their sponsorship of “Cannabis Weekly”. Honorable mention goes to our sponsor KO Fitness and Firearms, for sponsoring the news series “Love and Protect”.
Thank you so much for being a part of our Verified News Community. We are a community supported news network. Every email sign up, every registered app user on the free VNN app, every dollar donated, every article and video view, means the absolute world to us.
Check back all this week for more cool birthday updates and surprises!