On Standing Rock, Local News Is Teetering

“We are like living ghosts,” the editor of the Teton Times said.

In January, the Lakota Times, a newspaper based in southwestern South Dakota, on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, abruptly announced its closure, citing “unforeseen circumstances and health issues.” Avis Red Bear, an Indigenous journalist based in McLaughlin, a small town in the center of the Standing Rock reservation, took the closure of the Lakota Times especially hard: it’s where she began her career, in 1990, at a previous incarnation of the publication. Red Bear felt wistful about her years spent at the Lakota Times—and it hit her, too, that Red Bear could just as easily have been announcing the closure of her own paper, the financially strapped Teton Times, which has covered the Standing Rock Sioux since 2002.

Standing Rock, one of the largest Native American reservations in the United States, straddles the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. Cattle roam the rolling plains, where crops of soybeans grow. Red Bear knows that if her newspaper were to close, the region would be left with just one other outlet, KLND Radio. And KLND is facing its own challenges: it lost roughly half its funding in 2025 after Congress clawed 1.1 billion dollars back from public media. “We are like living ghosts. With the internet and social media, society looks right through us. Soon we will disappear altogether,” Red Bear said.