by Josh Duong-Tran & Ethan Karpal
Summary
In 2022, migrants were transported to the East Coast by the governors of Arizona, Texas, and Florida, intensifying New York City’s housing crisis with thousands of new arrivals processed by many city services, including the Department of Homeless Services. Documented adopted a people-centered approach to reporting, providing vital information on housing, food, and legal aid through Spanish language WhatsApp and website services. The newsroom covered the crisis’s mental health impacts, resource scarcity in shelters, and the challenges faced by migrant children while also creating two websites to guide new immigrants, including recently arrived asylum seekers and migrants, in navigating their new environment in New York City.
Organization Background: Documented is a nonprofit newsroom using community-driven journalism to expand access to news and critical information that helps immigrants in New York and across the country thrive. Their team has developed a unique community-driven journalism model (CDJM), allowing them to meet immigrant New Yorkers where they are (on high-use platforms including WeChat, NextDoor, and WhatsApp) and in their mother tongue (publishing in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Simplified Chinese, in addition to English). Insights from their community readers fuel Documented’s reporting, investigations, resources, and democratizing data projects. This includes their Wage Theft Monitor.
Snapshot
Project Goals
Documented has created an evergreen catalog of resource guides, how-tos, and Know-Your-Rights explainers for immigrant New Yorkers. Their main goals were to:
- Respond with valuable help and informational resources for asylum seekers and new arrivals.
- Inform influential figures in the New York City political landscape about how their response is meeting or not meeting community needs.
- Determine the impact of immigrant-centered civic journalism on the public.
Project Resources
Founded in 2018, Documented has become the go-to news source for New York’s immigrant communities. They currently employ three community correspondents to reach and engage with New York’s Chinese-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and Caribbean immigrant communities.
Tools & Technology
Documented utilized their bespoke software, the Wage Theft Monitor: the largest public repository of data on New York businesses found guilty of wage theft. 127,000 New Yorkers were victims of wage theft, totaling up to 52 million dollars in stolen funds between 2017 and 2021. They utilize Nextdoor, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (X), and WeChat to keep updated on community stories. WhatsApp is the primary resource due to the 1-to-1 communication with documented journalists and the specified groups and their questions and concerns. Documented’s success in fostering engagement is attributed to its focus on creating thoughtful and interactive content. They did this by leveraging individualized interaction channels and working towards a powerful sense of community throughout their audience.
Impact
Documented uses an impact tracker designed in collaboration with Impact Architects to understand their success in resourcing New York’s immigrant communities. Documented measures its impact in four ways:
- How many immigrant New Yorkers have their voices and experiences heard and amplified, and how many people we are able to connect to needed services
- How many immigrant New Yorkers are empowered with information on how to claim and protect their rights and how to engage with their communities on issues impacting their lives
- How many pieces of policy have changed or been instated as a result of Documented reporting
- How does the nonprofit journalism sector change to follow our lead and become more community-minded? Documented NY has helped hundreds of migrants access food, funding, healthcare, and other services.
How it Happened
Max Siegelbaum had always been fascinated with the media’s perception of immigrants. In 2012, he followed the Arab Spring closely and moved to Egypt to cover migration in the Middle East. There, he met Mazin Sidahmed, who was reporting on the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Instead of reporting solely on communities affected by immigration policies, they include migrant voices by publishing in their language and distributing the articles on familiar platforms. When migrants started showing up in NYC, Documented simply took what was already in practice and activated it for community-centered circumstances.
What Worked
1. Modifying their strategy when needed
As Documented prepared to expand coverage beyond Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants, they had to clarify their intended audience. The second and third largest immigrant communities in New York are Chinese immigrants and, combined, people from the countries of the Caribbean region that are not primarily Spanish-speaking. There was scant information available on these communities, so Documented spent a year researching each group and designing an information needs assessment. They funneled their prospective audience repeatedly and provided them with specified answers around which they could modify their reporting and data collection, offering support as described.
2. Distributing news and information in easily accessible ways
During Documented’s extensive interviewing phase, they interviewed 946 Chinese and 191 Caribbean immigrants. Post-data collection, they combined two rounds of research with existing data from census reports and other public findings to create a holistic picture of the news habits of these immigrant groups. Some key findings from their research included how:
- 85% of Chinese New Yorkers who participated said they had seen information they suspected to be false or fake news when using social media like WeChat or Facebook.
- 77% of Chinese respondents don’t see themselves well represented in the news.
- 87% of Chinese respondents mention feeling “worried about the public safety in NYC,” “unsafe,” or “dangerous” living in the city.
- 57% of Caribbean respondents said the current media coverage is “too negative.”
- 70% of Caribbean respondents use the apps “Nextdoor” or “Citizen” as a local news source.
These insights informed the news products that Documented has published continue to inform their editorial agenda.
3. Focusing on Migrant Needs
A large part of Documented’s ethos is to focus on the migrant needs. Haitian multimedia journalist and Documented community correspondent Ralph Thommassaint Joseph describes his work as akin to a liaison officer. “I will create a two-way conversation between Documented and the Caribbean communities of New York,” he says. “It’s a strategy to make the media closer to its audience, grow interaction, and continue with what Documented has been doing. It’s a media to inform, but it’s a media of service too.”
What Could Have Worked Better
1. Strategizing around news
Documented’s report was comprehensive in its provisions of migrant resources. An extensive debrief post-data collection revealed streamlining processes that could be integrated into future projects. For one, Documented learned to solidify their strategies around collecting and disseminating news, as much of the project centered around how migrants consumed news. As Documented solidifies its strategies around collecting and disseminating news, it establishes a presence that their reporting is necessary for migrant audiences. Applying these statistics for news-gathering would help bring consistent viewership and decrease migrant news deserts for their audience.
2. Reporting in more languages
Recent demand for Arabic and French welcomes new opportunities for specialized reporting. Documented’s community correspondent vetting and hiring process is open to fluent speakers. This hiring process hopes to improve coverage of these communities and disseminate relevant civic information to the non-migrant New York audience, even as we double down on the communities currently in focus: Spanish-speaking, Chinese-speaking and Caribbean.
3. Relying less on digital materials
Documented’s extensive digital archive allows users to interact instantaneously with any specialized communities they report on. However, this access calls for constant usage of bespoke software and limits the audience to one with constant internet access. For future projects, Documented hopes to, in addition to robust digital offerings, produce more physical newsletter copies and design fliers with access to necessary information they can distribute.
Learn More
To learn more, reach out to Max Siegelbaum by email or on Twitter. You can also check out the following links: