Cultivating Trust with AI in the Deep South will deploy Suwali, an AI-powered community knowledge hub developed by the journalism technology nonprofit Meedan, across the Pulitzer Prize-winning Deep South Today’s network of newsrooms, which includes Mississippi Today, Verite News, and The Current. Suwali allows newsrooms to index their own reporting, local records, and permissioned community knowledge, then delivers verified, sourced answers to audience questions over messaging platforms like WhatsApp, while feeding community queries back to reporters as actionable insight. Paired with the rollout is a rigorous pre- and post-deployment audience study led by trust-in-news scholar Benjamin Toff and the Alliance for Trust in Media, designed to measure whether conversational AI can meaningfully strengthen the bonds between communities and the journalists who serve them, and to produce a replicable playbook for newsrooms nationwide.
Cultivating Trust with AI in the Deep South2026-2027
