In the past decade, study after study has come to a troubling conclusion: Trust in news and journalism has declined dramatically.

The public’s loss of trust corresponds with the explosive development of our information ecosystem. The more options audiences have to find news elsewhere, the less trust the public has placed in traditional forms of journalism.

However, trust in journalism was displaced long before the rise of digital and social media.

That’s especially true for Black communities that have been harmfully misrepresented by mainstream outlets. Research, for example, has consistently shown how the news media has contributed to overrepresentation of Black people in crime coverage, which contributes to a litany of negative outcomes and perceptions.

Scholars, including me, have detailed how mainstream journalism continues to marginalize and misrepresent Black people. That especially happens in protest, crime and health coverage. It’s no surprise that Black communities have a long history of turning away from mainstream journalism.

As such, a closer look at these communities can also give us insights into how to win some of that trust back.

Despite past harmful coverage, some Black people trust media anyway.

In a recent study I conducted with colleagues, we identified places where people do still trust media and focused on the next essential question: Why?

To answer this, we turned to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, to learn from journalists trusted by Black communities. In 2022, two years after the murder of George Floyd, our research team began surveying over 100 Black community members and residents to ask them about whom they........

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