You Can Trust Me - Sioux Falls

Who do you trust?

In 2026, it can feel like your news is coming from everywhere, and from nowhere. As local newspapers continue to halt operations, fewer people have access to information about their towns and cities – the communities with no access to local news are called news deserts. Plenty of research cites the negative effects of newslessness: isolation, polarization, and democratic backsliding, to name a few.

But there’s a lot less research on the ways people are making it work with fewer, or even no, newspapers. You Can Trust Me is a project that brings together residents of small or remote communities across the United States to understand what local news looks like in 2026, how people get that news, and how they trust the information they’re getting. The first stop: South Dakota.

Join us on Thursday, October 8th for a workshop and celebration of Eastern South Dakota newsmakers of all kinds. We’ll hear from radio-makers to Facebook group enthusiasts, discuss trust in our local communities, and imagine possible futures for local news. Over some great food and even better company, we’ll work to answer a question that seems to get more important by the day: can I trust you?

First started in the mountain villages of Southwestern Turkey as part of a research scholarship with the Fulbright Program, You Can Trust Me partners locally with South Dakota News Watch and South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Nationally, the project partners with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism on matters of the editorial. 

• Timeline
• 5:30 pm - Doors Open
• Refreshments will be provided
• 6:00 pm - Workshop Begins
• 8:00 pm - Workshop Ends

About the reporter behind You Can Trust Me:

Born and raised in Rapid City, Eda Uzunlar is a multimedia journalist focused on making news about the news. For the last year, she's spent time between rural villages in Turkey as a Fulbright Scholar and small towns in the United States to learn how people get their local news when there isn't a professional to give it to them. She also reports on culture, human interest, and education for outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, PRX, NPR, and its affiliate stations. She's a graduate of Yale University, where she wrote her thesis on news resilience under authoritarianism. You can talk to her about community radio stations, ephemera, and anything else at [email protected].