For people, not for clicks

The protesters’ placards in Times Square are colourful: “No ICE in our city!” is emblazoned in red letters on a cardboard sign; another declares in blue: “Save our healthcare!”. The demands of the more than 100,000 demonstrators who have flooded New York’s streets are as wide-ranging as the Trump administration’s attacks on their political freedoms.

Less prominent is the subject I discuss with journalist Lam Thuy Vo just a few metres away on a side street off Broadway, at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism: the crisis facing US media. Elsewhere it might well be the number-one topic of conversation; in Trump’s America right now, it is little more than a footnote. And yet the increasingly precarious state of the media landscape gives ample cause for concern.

Lam Thuy Vo knows this from personal experience. Her former employer, National Public Radio (NPR), has just had US$1.1 billion in public funding withdrawn by the US Congress — along with other broadcasters — and her last full-time job at the non-profit online magazine The Markup fell victim to a change of ownership and the subsequent “restructuring”. For Lam, these are emblematic examples of two troubling trends: “On the one hand, the state is cutting off the lifeblood of the country’s few non-commercial broadcasters; on the other, corporations are buying up the remaining small media outlets.”

“Why am I writing stories for readers at the other end of the world?”

And these developments can be closely intertwined. This was underscored by the scandal involving host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who temporarily lost his late-night show under pressure from President Trump. Lam Thuy Vo has experienced first-hand that, for billion-dollar media corporations, the balance sheet is what really matters. As a former editor at buzzfeed.com, one of the most popular media platforms in the English-speaking world, it was all about getting clicks.

“Fifty thousand clicks per article were the norm; up to 300,000 was pretty good; between 500,000 and a million was the goal,” she recalls. A substantial share of those clicks came from abroad — from places like India, Japan and the UK. “I asked myself: why am I writing stories for readers at the other end of the world? Didn't I once aim to make a difference locally?”

Those questions led Lam to where I meet her today — at the City University of New York, where she has been teaching data journalism since 2023 — and to Documented. The non-profit news organisation was founded in 2018 by Mazin Sidahmed and Max Siegelbaum, two US journalists who were then reporting on displacement and migration from the Middle East for outlets such as Vice and Foreign Policy — and who shared a common frustration: the articles their editors demanded offered little real value to the people they interviewed day after day in Syrian refugee camps. “Our work felt exploitative in a way,” explains 36-year-old Sidahmed. “We were writing for the broadest possible audience back home. We really wanted the people our stories were about to also count among our readers.”

That ambition led the way to a New York newsroom that has gone from strength to strength over the past seven years. In the beginning, the team worked out of Siegelbaum’s flat; today, Documented has its own offices, employs 17 full-time staff and dozens of freelancers, including Lam Thuy Vo. For her, the organisation — whose motto is “News that speaks your language” — represents the opposite of what ails the US media landscape as a whole. “Documented doesn’t report about communities, but for specific communities,” Lam explains, as the titles of upcoming university lectures flicker across a screen on the wall behind her: Tuesday: “Is the US Still a Safe Haven for Journalists Under Threat?”; Wednesday: “Journalism in Hard Times”.

At the heart of Documented’s reporting are migrant communities in New York, whose stories are often touched on by national outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post, but rarely told in full. On documentedny.com, however, the aim is not only to portray the lived realities of these communities, but also to provide them with information they scarcely receive in the media mainstream. This is why the website offers tailored local journalism in English, Spanish, Chinese and Haitian Creole — covering everything from the New York mayoral election and raids by the immigration authority ICE to a report on the free distribution of bicycle tools in public libraries. In addition, Documented publishes practical guides and advice on topics such as “What do I do if I lose my green card?” and “What rights do you have without a residence permit?”. These are questions that do not arise in editorial meetings in Lower Manhattan, but in conversations with readers in migrant-heavy boroughs such as Queens and Brooklyn.

“Our readers should find our content where they already hang out online”

The team organises neighbourhood forums and runs community chats, for example via the Chinese Facebook analogue WeChat and the social network Nextdoor, which is particularly popular among Spanish-speaking residents. “Our readers should find our content where they already hang out online,” explains Documented co-founder Max Siegelbaum. For Lam Thuy Vo, whose family background is German and Vietnamese, this is precisely what the major US media houses now lack: a local focus and trust earned on the ground. “You can really only produce good reporting if you’re close to the people,” she says. “But most media organisations are moving in exactly the opposite direction: they often don’t have reporters on the ground at all.”

At Documented, Lam explains, it’s not about how many people a story reaches, but which people — and about the size of the impact it can have, for instance in the city council or among members of the New York State Assembly. It is no coincidence that the organisation’s newsletter Early Arrival, which summarises key migrant related news each week and has some 50,000 subscribers, is sent primarily to politicians in New York and across the country.

For Mazin Sidahmed, this kind of new-old local journalism is a counter-model to what US mass media are doing. His vision is for the Documented approach to spread nationwide. To this end, Sidahmed wants to found and support twenty editorial projects from the East Coast to the West Coast, including independent websites, radio stations and alternative weekly newspapers. “We hope to find the right people for this — young people, journalists of colour, who understand their work as we do but so far haven’t had the time or the resources to try something new,” he says.

Is that thinking too big? Perhaps. After all, the donation-funded organisation has so far only been able to afford to swim against the media mainstream because of the backing of foundations such as the Ford Foundation. But you could also argue that this is the only way alternative forms of journalism will stand a chance in the future — in a country where public-service media have traditionally played only a minor role. “In many ways, we’re living in a broken media ecosystem,” says Lam Thuy Vo. “With our work, we’re trying to restore it, at least in part.”

This article was originally published in German.