Columbia Journalism Review: Documented Gears Up for Trump

Published in Columbia Journalism Review

When Donald Trump won reelection, the staff of Documented, dedicated to providing news to New York’s low-income immigrant communities, was not surprised. Documented focuses on the city’s largest minority groups—Spanish-speakers, as well as Chinese and Caribbean residents—publishing both on its website and directly to social media: on WhatsApp, in Spanish; WeChat, in Chinese; and NextDoor, in Haitian Creole, collectively reaching thousands. To hear from them, reporters host town halls, attend community events, and conduct extensive research—including last summer, when a Documented poll revealed that more than 60 percent of Chinese readers were worried about their safety, upset about an influx of asylum seekers, and dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. Rommel Ojeda, the Spanish-speaking-community correspondent, found that many longtime residents believe recent arrivals from across the southern border to be driving up crime, in spite of police statistics that say otherwise. (“Illegal people are causing harm in the city,” a source told him.) “At most newsrooms, journalists bring the pitches, but for us, our community does,” Ethar El-Katatney, the editor in chief, said. “So what happens if the community is asking for content, or has a concern, that is not very comfortable for us? Immigrant communities are just as susceptible to the same mainstream issues of media wanting to reaffirm their worldview. How do you challenge that and serve them at the same time? Those are the things we’re grappling with.”

Throughout last year, Documented covered the splintering of immigrant communities and the rise of pro-Trump sentiment. Now its journalists are examining how the new administration will come to bear on the people they cover—and preparing to broaden their reach. In December, Documented received a two-million-dollar grant from the Knight Foundation, to be spent over the next three years on helping newsrooms across the country adapt their practices for serving immigrants during the second Trump presidency.

Documented has been refining its approach for years, since even before its official formation. The founders—Mazin Sidahmed, who is thirty-six, and began his career writing for the Daily Star, in Beirut, and Max Siegelbaum, thirty-four, who spent formative years as a freelancer in Cairo, working for Vice and Foreign Policy—both reported on the movement of Syrian refugees in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Sidahmed would interview people at camps, only to go back to his office and write “a story in a language that they couldn’t read and they would never really engage with,” he recalled. “That relationship always felt very extractive.” He met Siegelbaum later, in New York; they bonded over a shared sense of reporting to the wrong audience. “We wanted people at the center of the story to also be the ones reading,” he said. When Trump began his first term, and set about reshaping the American immigration system, national outlets covered the border policies coming out of Washington. But amid the withering of local newspapers, the guys observed, countless stories about the immigrant experience went untold. At the height of the family separation crisis, they decided to act.

In 2018, they launched Documented from Siegelbaum’s apartment as a lean, for-profit, membership-focused operation, with the aim of reporting for the city’s immigrant communities. They soon realized, however, that their model was not aligned with their mission. “To generate revenue in a for-profit membership model, you have to focus on a niche, affluent audience,” Sidahmed said. A few months in, they pivoted to become a nonprofit—a challenging move to pull off. Donors, he noted, can be fickle. “It’s not as predictable as membership,” he said. “And it depends on who you know.” But they learned that a cold call to a foundation office can go a long way: in 2019, the Brooklyn Organization (formerly known as the Brooklyn Community Foundation) placed Documented in an accelerator program, providing free office space for eighteen months. Funding from the Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy followed.

Today, Documented has seventeen full-time staff members and a roster of freelancers, based out of an office in Lower Manhattan, in a space shared with The City. The site has four versions—in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Haitian Creole—featuring articles specific to each group, most of them translated by the authors. There are also verticals on housing and wage theft; the latter features a data-visual mapping project showing the dollar amounts owed to workers across the state—currently in English, though translations are planned. Other stories share advice on work permits from asylum seekers and reporting on the plight of Chinese tenants stuck in the city’s housing court without translation services; these appear alongside practical guides to the resources available to immigrants in New York, from after-school programs to food aid. A newsletter, Early Arrival, targets policymakers with coverage of immigrant concerns nationally; it has fifty thousand subscribers and a 35 percent open rate.

“The bigger picture is about setting an example for how immigration journalism can be done differently, in a way that centers immigrants and makes them the protagonists of the story,” Madeline Faber, who serves as the director of communities, said. That means not just listening, El-Katatney told me, but “actively asking”—on social media and, say, by setting up a table at a community toy drive. Their model takes inspiration from a project developed by Internews, a media nonprofit: the Listening Post Collective, focused on developing equitable community engagement in local journalism by mapping community needs and sharing tools, resources, and support networks. The collective, which produced a guide called the Civic Media Playbook, emphasizes the importance of integrating journalism into existing information ecosystems. For Documented, that has involved conducting more than a thousand interviews in Chinese and Caribbean communities to direct their coverage. The result is not a rapid news metabolism—reporters’ time is divided between writing articles and, on different days, hosting forums, assembling guides, or engaging in online chats—but it is generative. (Documented has partnered with the Listening Post Collective on an initiative to support immigrant-facing newsrooms.)

“It’s an entire mindset shift for journalists,” Sidahmed told me. When they go national, he said, there will be no set curriculum or one-size-fits-all tool to share—journalists will be advised to let their communities drive coverage, and to be ready to get feedback in person. In the end, Documented plans to assist twenty immigrant-facing newsrooms across the country—independent sites, radio stations, alt-weeklies, and other local outlets—retooling their editorial processes to speak directly with immigrant groups. The funds will also be directed to newsrooms and to pay for a Documented staff member to travel nationwide, coaching colleagues. “We’re hoping that we can find the people—young people, journalists of color who want to reach their families—who already have that ethos but just haven’t had the bandwidth or the resources to try something out,” Sidahmed said.

As Trump returns to the White House, Documented is bracing for impact. “It’s going to be an assault on the folks we serve,” Sidahmed told me. The team is keeping in close touch with, for instance, people who might not show up for doctors’ appointments because they fear their data becoming exposed, and that they might be deported. “If we can provide any kind of clarity or information that can help people live their lives better,” Sidahmed said, “that is success in my eyes.”