The present study explores race, journalism, and perceptions of trust and mistrust through the lens of Black communities and journalists who worked on ground zero of the “racial reckoning” that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. We explore the landscape of trust as it exists across entities and spaces with news and information systems through surveys of Black community members and interviews with their most trusted news providers. In surveys, we find that Black residents in the Twin Cities trust individuals more than institutions. Those individuals aren’t just traditional media makers, but many of them are Black journalists. In our interviews with the named trusted messengers from these survey, we explore the intersection of racial and occupational identities to understand better how trust and distrust coexist and how Black journalists perceive and negotiate their roles in their communities and employers. Data from in-depth interviews with ground-zero journalists suggests that, in order to navigate this climate as a trust broker successfully, journalists must prioritize their community understanding within the context of the institutional harm created by media organizations and then navigate communities with soft skills that may appear somewhat antithetical to traditional journalistic practice and timeliness demands – through diligence, which requires journalists to invest time in a community persistently, and deference, which requires journalists to cede time, space and authority to those they are trying to work with.