On a drizzly day in New York’s Chinatown, journalist April Hsu suggests stopping at a bakery for a snack.
“But Fei Da is different,” she said, referring to a bakery on a nearby corner.
Mr. Xu doesn’t go to Fei Da Bakery anymore. It comes after she reported on an incident in which New York’s largest Chinese bakery chain allegedly stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages from its employees.
Many people feel an affinity for the famous bakery, Schuh told VOA. “When they saw the news, they were shocked,” she said.
In April, the bakery agreed to a $940,000 settlement to resolve claims by former and current employees.
That was a big story. It’s the kind of story that Documented, the nonprofit outlet where she works, likes to tell. This immigration-focused news outlet highlights under-reported stories on issues like wage theft and housing.
As immigration became a polarizing issue in the U.S. presidential election, the news organization found itself balancing regular reporting with debunking false claims. At a time when racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric is being pushed by the far right, the team at Documented believes local reporting on immigration is critical.
Co-founder Mazin Siddarmed said the inspiration for Documented came from frustration with the way immigrants are often covered in mainstream media.
Documenting co-founder Mazin Sidarmed (photographed on September 24, 2024).
Sudanese-born Cedarmed worked for New York’s Guardian newspaper and other media outlets before helping launch his own outlet in 2018.
“No one was really covering how these big federal policy shifts were playing out at the local level in big cities like New York, where most immigrants actually live,” Cedarmed said. told VOA from the agency’s offices in the financial district.
“There was a real gap and we needed a site to report on how federal immigration policy is playing out on the ground,” he said.
Cedarmed said a commitment to meeting the needs of its audience is central to Documented’s success.
Early on, the outlet began a needs assessment focused on its Spanish-speaking audience. According to Cedarmed, they have been very successful in finding ways to best serve that community.
They found that respondents felt they were often portrayed as either criminals or victims in the media and wanted news that would help them take advantage of government resources.
Documented launched a Spanish-language news service on the app after learning that the community was getting most of its news from WhatsApp groups.
“Over the past five years, it has really grown into a driving force behind much of our most powerful journalism,” Cedarmed said. “But getting there was incredibly difficult and challenging and required a lot of trust-building.”
In addition to English and Spanish, Documented is also published in Chinese and Haitian Creole. In order to better serve the Chinese community, Documented operates a news account on WeChat. For Caribbean communities, use the NextDoor platform.
“We feel we can’t ask people to visit our website to see the news every day. We should bring the news to them,” Xu said.
Platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat are two-way. Documented delivers the news and allows viewers to contact reporters directly with story tips and questions.
That way, Sidahmed said, Documented can create content that responds to their needs.
We also publish content that helps viewers navigate government bureaucracies and access resources.
“I don’t think there’s any mainstream news organization out there that doesn’t just report on immigration, but actually works directly with immigrants like this and works to serve them,” Fisayo-Okale said. Originally from Nigeria, she writes the outlet’s newsletter.
Approximately 3.1 million immigrants lived in New York City in 2022, accounting for 38% of the city’s total population, according to a report from the Mayor’s Office.
Many of Documented’s staff consider themselves part of that group. Okare believes the team’s background further strengthens their work.
“Being an immigrant myself, I tend to understand what other immigrants are going through,” she says. “We take pride in not only writing about immigrants, but writing for them.”
Recent revisions include unsubstantiated claims about illegal immigration, including a conspiracy theory repeated by candidate Donald Trump about Haitians in Ohio.
“Our role during this period was to put out correct information whenever something was shared that was completely wrong or inaccurate,” Okale said.
Documented also bucks that trend in the U.S., where the local news industry has struggled for years.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has lost more than a third of its newspapers, according to a 2024 report by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. Approximately 55 million people nationwide have limited or no access to local news, according to the report.
“When a city loses its local news outlets, it has all the other devastating effects on the city. People start to see their local issues within this nationalized lens, and they start seeing their own local issues in their own communities. You become tied down and you don’t feel connected,” Siddermed said.
Journalists are optimistic about the future. Documented aims to be the leading news source for the communities it covers in New York, he said.
“We see an opportunity to reimagine local news and rewrite the contract between local news organizations and the communities that have had a bad relationship with local news,” he said.
