We are launching our new website today to help usher Documented into its next chapter after over three years of bringing you the most important stories about immigration and immigrant communities in New York City.
We launched Documented from my living room couch in June 2018 with a story about the high cost of immigration bonds. It was the summer of Trump’s family separation policy and the news was coming fast. Over time, we started to get our feet under us and began breaking more stories. A series we published led to public dollars being divested from private prison companies in Canada and New Jersey. A story we published helped end the practice of ICE courthouse arrests. Our work was referenced in federal lawsuits, by government watchdog organizations and many media outlets.
And beneath everything we do — the engine that runs Documented — is the belief that the stories and information we publish can change lives.
Now, we are the biggest we have ever been, with six full-time staff members and one more reporter slated to join next year (the job posting is open!). Over the past year, we launched our event series Documented Talks, filed three freedom of information lawsuits, grew our Spanish language output and made plans to expand our community-based reporting to meet the needs of Caribbean and Chinese immigrant communities in New York. That’s all gone on while we continued to publish the well-sourced, revealing reporting we always have.
In designing our new site, we sought to break down any technological barriers between our readers and the stories we publish. You will now see a new emphasis on the many vital resources our community engagement team has compiled over the past year and a half. Also, you’ll notice a reorganization of the way we categorize the articles we publish. It is a small, technical detail, but our values and goals were imbued in every step of the website redesign process. All of the sections, headers and placement of articles on the site were done so in an attempt to show what issues we think are important and deserve further coverage.
We hope you enjoy the new site as much as we do. If so, please consider donating to support our work. Our annual fundraising campaign is still in full force and all contributions are being matched dollar for dollar — and every dollar goes to our work investigating and telling stories that matter to immigrant New Yorkers.
