Documented’s blend of service journalism, traditional reporting and embrace of digital platforms native to our audiences has enabled us to break ground in how immigrant communities are being served by local media in New York City. In order to reach the three immigrant communities we focus on, we publish on three different platforms: WeChat, Nextdoor and WhatsApp. We chose the platforms after an exhaustive research process, where we surveyed over 1000 New Yorkers who are of Caribbean origin, or speak Chinese or Spanish at home. We did this in order to understand the issues that matter most to them and used that information to craft editorial strategies for each vertical. We also chose platforms that enable us to engage with our readers in conversation, so that we can solicit story ideas from them.
In November 2024, Documented launched Documented.info, a hub for service journalism that meets the needs of new migrants in New York City. We do this through two approaches. The first is a 1:1 conversation between migrants and the Documented.info team of journalists and local experts who can answer questions in English, Spanish, French and Haitian Creole. The second approach is through our written library of how-to guides and a map of hundreds of service providers. Together, these resources empower migrants to get the information they need to settle in their new city. Documented.info is powered by a first-of-its kind collaboration between the nonprofit newsroom Documented and the International Rescue Committee, a leading humanitarian organization that supports refugees and asylum seekers all over the world. The 1:1 messaging, which is accessible on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email and Instagram direct messages, is an innovative reuse of ZenDesk, a customer service messaging platform.
In the past year, we have answered vital questions from our audience of migrants and asylum seekers about the drastic changes being made by the Trump administration to the immigration system through publishing content on our site, on WhatsApp and other platforms, while also holding livestreams and in person events. We pioneered new ways of reaching audiences through using technology built for customer service to answer questions from readers. We were the first newsroom the strategically use the social media network Nextdoor to distribute news, spur conversations and solicit story ideas.
In addition to our service journalism, we also found new ways to use tech in our reporting. We drove local innovation by being the first organization to make available thousands of records of wage theft cases in New York, which we updated this year. We build a tool to analyze TikTok information to identify immigration related misinformation. We did all of this, while also breaking vital stories about New York, like the fact that teenage asylum seekers living in the Bronx were being sent to CECOT prison in El Salvador, and being the first news organization to report that many members of the city’s immigrant communities had shifted their political affiliation towards Donald Trump and the Republican party.
