New York — On a drizzly day in New York’s Chinatown, journalist April Xu suggested stopping at a bakery for a snack.
“But not Fay Da,” she said, referring to a bakery on the nearby corner.
Xu doesn’t go to Fay Da Bakery anymore. Not since she reported on how New York’s largest Chinese bakery chain had allegedly stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages from its employees.
Many people feel connected to the famous bakery, Xu 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.
It was a big story — the kind that the nonprofit media outlet Documented, where she works, likes to tell. Under-covered stories on issues such as wage theft and housing are the focus of this immigrant-focused news outlet.
With immigration a polarizing issue in the U.S. presidential election, the news outlet finds itself balancing its typical coverage with debunking false claims. As racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric is pushed by the far-right, Documented’s team sees their local coverage of immigration as crucial.
The inspiration for Documented came from dissatisfaction with how mainstream media often covered immigration, said co-founder Mazin Sidahmed.
Born in Sudan, Sidahmed worked for The Guardian in New York and other media before helping set up his own outlet in 2018.
“No one was really covering how those big federal policy shifts were playing out at the local level in big cities like New York, where most immigrants actually live,” Sidahmed told VOA at the outlet’s office in the Financial District.
“There was a real hole and a need for a site that was covering how federal immigration policy was playing out locally,” he said.
A commitment to meeting the audience’s needs has been central to Documented’s success, Sidahmed said.
Early on, the outlet launched a needs assessment focused on Spanish-speaking audiences. It was hugely successful in figuring out how to best serve that community, according to Sidahmed.
They found that respondents felt that they were typically portrayed in the media as either criminals or victims, and they wanted news that would help them navigate government resources.
When Documented learned that the community got most of its news from WhatsApp groups, it started a Spanish-language news service on the app.
“Over the past five years, it has really grown into an engine that’s driving a lot of our most powerful journalism,” Sidahmed said. “But getting it to that point was incredibly hard and challenging, and it involved building a lot of trust.”
In addition to English and Spanish, Documented publishes in Mandarin and Haitian Creole. To better serve the Chinese community, Documented operates a news account on WeChat. For the Caribbean community, it uses the platform NextDoor.
“We feel that we can’t ask people to go to our website to consume news every day. We should deliver the news to them,” Xu said.
Platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat are two-way streets. Documented delivers news, and audiences can directly contact reporters with story tips or questions.
That way, said Sidahmed, Documented can produce content that is in service of their needs.
It also publishes content that helps audiences navigate government bureaucracy or access resources.
“I don’t think there’s any mainstream news outlet that is really working with immigrants directly in that way, to serve them, as opposed to just covering them,” said Fisayo Okare. Originally from Nigeria, she writes the outlet’s newsletter.
In 2022, New York City was home to about 3.1 million immigrants — accounting for 38% of the city’s total population — according to a report from the mayor’s office.
Many of Documented’s staffers count themselves among that population. Okare thinks their work is enhanced by the team’s background.
“As an immigrant myself, I tend to understand what other immigrants are going through,” she said. “We pride ourselves on not just writing about immigrants but writing for them.”
More recently, that has included correcting baseless claims about illegal immigration, including conspiracy theories that candidate Donald Trump repeated about Haitians in Ohio.
“Our role during this time has been to put out the right information whenever just completely wrong or inaccurate information is shared,” Okare said.
Documented has also bucked trends in the U.S., where the local news industry has been struggling for years.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has lost more than one-third of its newspapers, according to a 2024 report by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. Almost 55 million people across the country have limited to no access to local news, the report found.
“When a city loses a local news institution, it has all of these other catastrophic effects on the city. People start to see their local issues in this nationalized lens and don’t feel as tethered and connected to their communities,” Sidahmed said.
The journalist is optimistic about the future. Documented is aiming to become the leading news source for the communities it is covering in New York, he said.
“We see an opportunity to rebuild local news and rewrite that contract between local news outlets and the communities that have typically had bad relationships with local news,” he said.
…