Mazin Sidahmed co-founded the nonprofit media outlet Documented with Max Siegelbaum in 2018 in New York City. They both reported on immigration, and recognized that there wasn’t enough local coverage of the topic and immigrants were never the intended audience. To reach immigrants, translation wasn’t enough, they realized you had to change your approach to reporting. Seven years later, Documented has developed a multilingual team of correspondents and is dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities. With messenger groups for its audience in four languages, Documented has taken a radically different community-driven approach to journalism, impacting the everyday experiences of immigrants in the United States.
I spoke with Mazin through Zoom. Below are excerpts of our conversation.
The topic of immigration has become highly politicized in the United States and Europe. How are you dealing with that?
For the reporters covering this every day, the velocity of changes that are happening make the job incredibly hard. We explain what’s happening at the federal level to immigrants here in New York. The scale of harm is huge, and it takes a toll on journalists going to New York City’s immigration court and dealing with questions from people we don’t have an answer to.
We try to keep our people’s mental health and morale boosted while covering this issue. We encourage them to make use of the health insurance with therapy coverage; we work with the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma; and we give people as much leave and mental health support as possible.
Documented provides resource guides in English, Spanish, Chinese and Haitian Creole, and you make use of online communication channels such as the Messenger services in various languages and on various platforms. Do you get most of your story ideas through this connection with your community?
Yes. We have Community Correspondents communicating on WhatsApp, WeChat, and NextDoor to connect with Spanish-speaking, Chinese, and Caribbean immigrants. They share in editorial meetings what they’ve been hearing from the community for the past week, and that often drives our editorial agenda. We make it a feedback loop so that we’re not just doing what a lot of newsrooms do: using the judgment of journalists to dictate what’s important and what should be news.
How did you set up this system, and how hard is it to keep it going? [It’s not automated.]
It’s a huge challenge to set it up. Right now, there are about 8,000 people signed up on WhatsApp, and that’s the upper barrier for how much you can do as an intimate one-to-one chat. It’s obviously not 8,000 people messaging every week—people tend to message when they have an issue, or there’s something relevant to them in our newsletter. Sometimes people just send a message to say, “thank you for your work,” or send a good morning GIF. Not everyone is sending in a pressing question that they need an answer to.
We have one and a half people working on it, spending most of their time on WhatsApp. We’re grappling with the question of what scaling that relationship would look like, to serve 700,000 Spanish-speaking people in New York City who have limited English language proficiency and aren’t served by the English-language media.
We want to experiment in the next phase with a blend of automation and in-person communication because we have a lot of guides and resources on our website already, and a lot of people are asking the same questions.
We can offer a menu of options to get the questions answered quickly, and [an option to] speak to one of our Community Correspondents.
Do you feel safe on WhatsApp?
From the day that we started, we explicitly don’t ask for names and make sure that people are not sending identifying information over the chat. There’s a lot of trust, so people often send unsolicited documents that contain their private and personal information. We make sure to wipe it and tell folks that they shouldn’t send that to us directly. There’s always a tradeoff between meeting people where they’re at, and the challenges of working in that place.
We’ve considered building our own messaging service, using open source tools that allow a closed secure messaging service, but it would require people to download and sign into a new app and we feel like that’s just too much friction.
I saw the impressive growth numbers in your annual report of last year: 41% growth in average monthly website unique visitors, 25% growth in WhatsApp subscribers, 600 attendees at community events. Are there any other impact matrices used beyond numbers like this?
We think of impact along the individual level: the people reaching out and saying our guide has helped them. Then we also think about the structural level, like policy change.
Our story about SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], and the benefits being pulled from different Chinese communities here in New York City, led to a state assembly person using that article to push for additional support.
And thirdly, we speak a lot about our model and approach to push for the journalism industry to center and prioritize immigrants, and in general, non-English-speaking people in the coverage. To create news that’s useful to those communities in their local areas.
We have an impact tracker where we’re keeping track of all of those different things.
Do you have a favorite individual impact story?
I think often about the different stages of being an immigrant—from first arriving in a country and getting acclimated, to being there for a while, and in between, where you’re navigating government programs that are meant to help you and support you.
We had hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers coming to New York City between 2022 and 2024 who were placed in shelters. One person told us how Rommel Ojeda, our Community Correspondent for Spanish-Speaking Communities, had been his guide in the city, helping him figure out how to get housing and government support, and how to really just navigate living in New York City on a week-to-week basis. He spoke a lot about how indispensable Rommel was at that time in his life, trying to get himself on his feet.
That’s my dream of the site: that when you arrive in a new place, there’s this media specifically geared towards you and your needs. We don’t realize how much of the coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and other news sites is about how to navigate life, live healthier, deal with anxiety—all things often relevant to educated, affluent people, whereas the problems and the day-to-day issues migrants are facing are often not tackled.
Documented received accelerator support in the beginning and still gets philanthropic grants. What does your revenue model look like, and are you aiming to reduce the dependency on grants?
We initially got funding through Civil, an experimental project around testing blockchain for news. They funded us along with 11 other news outlets. Civil did not succeed, but I’m very grateful to them for giving us a grant, helping build our website, and allowing us to quit our jobs and do this full-time.
We also got amazing accelerator support from the Brooklyn Org—not in the form of money, but in a working space, bookkeeping support, and legal support to get our 501c3 status [federal tax exemption of U.S. nonprofit organizations], and build the infrastructure for our work.
It was a real slog in the first two to three years to get foundation support in the U.S., but we’ve been able to build up support from a lot of foundations. Now we have about 85% of our funding from foundations, around 10% from individuals, and 5% from advertising.
We definitely want to grow the individual and advertising support, but I do think that foundations will always play a role in our revenue mix. We don’t want to be reliant on one foundation granting 50% of our budget, but instead have a diversity of foundations supporting us.
There’s been a market failure in local news. To maintain the quality of the work, it will always have to be a mix of foundations, individuals, and advertising money. And when you’re serving a low-wage community, it’s difficult to get the amount of individual donor support necessary to sustain your operations.
Philanthropic money often comes with an ambition to scale the business, and on your website you also mention scaling as a strategy. How do you approach that?
There’s a bit of tension around that question with funders, actually. Some funders would like to see Documented grow to 20 other cities. For us, scale means reaching more immigrants in New York City and expanding our base here, which we think is really ambitious.
A lot of philanthropists are borrowing from the VC [venture capitalist] world. They’re coming from tech with the vision that if you have one good idea in one place, the goal is to scale it up. For a company like Uber, it gets cheaper to add new cities the more that you do it. With local community-driven news, we wouldn’t save any money in setting up another four Documented in new cities because developing deep community connections doesn’t have economies of scale.
We recently got a grant from the Knight Foundation to train other newsrooms in how they can create news products for immigrant communities in their local areas. In the last five years, more than 100 news outlets have reached out to us to build a product and start a community correspondent model. We prefer to spread the tools we have, without us having to be the people that go and set up in other places.
Is there any legacy that you aim for as the co-founder of Documented?
Legacy makes me feel like I’m about to retire [laughs]. When we started Documented, Max and I were pretty traditional journalists, approaching this work with old ideas from journalism school. We initially thought that translation was the only thing that was missing in how to reach immigrant communities. Do the journalism the same way, just translate it. We went on this journey, and found all the other media folks thinking about the question of what is a story, and who is a story for. Moving forward with Documented, we hold onto that ethos, and we don’t lose sight of it as we continue to grow and do this work in other places.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press gave you the Local Champion Award in 2024. What does an award like that mean to you?
I brought my mom, that was really nice [laughs]. It helped her understand what I do a bit better to see my work. That was definitely a good upside of it. Recognition from peers is motivating and validating and a boost for me individually, to keep going in a job that’s really stressful and brutal at times. But we’re focusing on the impact in the community: how our readers, and the folks that use the work week in, week out, respond to it.