This news startup is redefining how immigrant communities are “Documented” — and who tells their stories

Documented is a New York City-based newsroom dedicated to reporting on immigrant communities with and for individuals and families in immigrant communities. 

By Jensen Toussaint. April 23, 2025.

Photo: Jensen Toussaint for Inti Media

In 2018, two journalists and overseas correspondents  — Mazin Sidahmed and Max Siebelbaum — joined forces to launch a new digital publication, Documented.

Documented website screenshot.

This was in the middle of the first Trump administration and the midst of the family separation crisis.

“They really wanted to do something different. They wanted to create a media source that would be about immigrants, and first and foremost, for the immigrants that they were covering,” said Rebecca Neuwirth, chief strategy officer at Documented.

Rebecca Neuwirth, chief strategy officer at Documented. Photo: Jensen Toussaint for Inti Media.

On Saturday, April 5, Neuwirth visited WHYY Studios for day two of the WHYY Civic News Summit. There, she took part in a fireside chat with WHYY’s vice president of news & civic dialogue, Sarah Glover.

Neuwirth joined the Documented team in 2023 after the publication reached the five-year mark and was in the process of creating a new strategy.

“One of the reasons why Documented has done very well is because they’ve been pretty honest all along, and very focused on how to reach the people that we’re working with and for,” she said.

There was no telling just how things would evolve, so Neuwirth was brought on to strengthen the publication’s strategy moving forward.

Since joining and completing the vision for Documented’s strategy, her role is now under three buckets.

“One is to help us ensure that we have the growth and the funding that makes it possible for us to lean hard into what needs to be done to reach these immigrant communities,” Neuwirth said.

In New York City, about one-third of residents are immigrants, and about two-thirds of New Yorkers don’t have English as their first language.

The second is figuring out how to tell the stories that are being told in a way that is different from how other media organizations are telling them. 

Meanwhile, the third is about building partnerships.

“How do we think completely different about what media is and get out there in [the] community, with community organizations that have the trust, with libraries that are meeting people every day, where they are with schools, with workforce development organizations?” Neuwirth added.

For the Documented team, it’s about service.

What makes Documented different?

When Sidahmed and Siebelbaum first launched the publication in 2018, they went out into the community to hear directly from them what issues they cared most about.

“The two things the community cared about were ICE raids — which were big in the news then, and even bigger in the news right now — and the second thing that they cared about, which was a real surprise, was wage theft,” said Neuwirth.

The latter is one not often highlighted in most news sources compared to shoplifting; however, is “many, many times a bigger loss leader than shoplifting,” Neuwirth said.

From there, the two co-founders started reporting on those topics and started to see the impact it was making. 

From there, they came to the realization that they wanted to translate the content to Spanish so the Spanish-speaking community could read it, as well.

Around the same time, a third member of the team — Nicolás Ríos, who is now the chief product, education, and research officer — joined.

He brought out the prospect of conducting a needs assessment study, again going out into the community and asking the community — this time the Spanish-speaking community — what they care about and where they consume their news.

Neuwirth said they heard three major things.

“One was people really wanted news that didn’t just portray them as either victims or villains, which is what they were used to when they read about their communities in the news,” she said.

This prompted the Documented team to ensure that reporters be “people who are part of those communities, speak the languages, and are deeply embedded in the spaces that they’re reporting on,” added Neuwirth.

The community also wanted actionable news that was relevant to them.

Rommel H. Ojeda is the community correspondent for Spanish-speaking communities, is also very active on WhatsApp, where he answers countless questions from the community daily.

“He is actually building his journalism off of what people are asking him,” Neuwirth said of Ojeda. “It takes a lot of discipline … I think it’s a completely different way of thinking about how to pick your stories editorially.”

The third takeaway was that people wanted news that met them on the platforms they were already actively getting their news from.

Documented has since built a news platform in Chinese on WeChat after it was determined that 65% of Chinese speakers in New York get their news on the platform.

“There was no independent source of news on that channel at all before we got there,” Neuwirth said.

The team also works closely with New York’s Caribbean communities.

To date, Documented publishes its articles in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Haitian Creole.

“I think we’ve seen incredible growth in the need for this journalism that we’re doing and we’re trying very hard to keep up with it,” Neuwirth said.

An evolution and drive for growth

Many of the challenges facing immigrant communities when Documented first launched in 2018 are still prevalent today.

In certain cases, it is even more prevalent today.

“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of demand in this very, very difficult moment,” Neuwirth said. 

Given that the team of journalists at Documented is from the communities they cover, they are often just as impacted.

As fear, trauma, and uncertainty permeate across these communities, the Documented team finds solace in the fact that the work being done has true meaning.

The team truly cares, and the community or readers can see that through the consistency, sensitivity, and quality of the reporting.

That is the essence of true and effective journalism.

“Journalism is a public good,” Neuwirth said.

This is one of the reasons why accessible journalism is so important.

“Trying to speak to [and] educate funders, educate our communities about that, and make it very clear that when we don’t have journalism, when we don’t have people reading information that is accurate and correct, that has journalistic ethics behind it, we have a much poorer society,” she added. 

Looking forward, Neuwirth highlighted that Documented is looking to continue building its team to become “the most trusted daily source of community-driven news” for the key communities they are covering.  

To close the fireside chat, Neuwirth left with two major takeaways for journalists.

First, was for journalists to take a hard look at how they relate to other people in their reporting, “while still having the integrity and the training and discipline that is journalism, and holding onto that.”

The second was the importance of partnerships.

“Sometimes journalists come thinking that they’re the smartest people at the table, and they might be, but our work is only effective if we’re actually genuinely reaching the people who we’re working with,” she added. “And the only way to do that is to genuinely listen and to think of their needs.”