Documented is excited to announce a new effort to support local newsrooms to reach and serve their city and regions’ immigrant communities, helping us meet the need to expand community driven reporting and audience development nationally. This foundational work is enabled by substantial support from Knight Foundation over the next three years. It entails the creation of a curriculum, substantive trainings that help select community-trusted media reach out to wider audiences and introduce new, responsive and multilingual products, and a community of practice to support continued learning.
The program will directly address overlapping crises as it relates to information and local news in the United States:
- A lack of support for newsrooms to have the time and resources to invest in new editorial approaches and product innovation for multilingual audiences
- An increasingly unreliable information ecosystem facing immigrants and non-English speakers at a time when the need for reliable, trusted and timely news is quite literally life altering for them.
As noted in our strategic plan, released in May 2024, this progression of our work is in direct response to requests we’ve received from newsrooms across the United States, Latin America and Europe to learn from our multilingual journalism products. With Knight’s support, we’re now able to formalize this work into a separate, funded program.
A dedicated team will catalog our learnings and build impactful trainings and direct support with small cohorts of local newsrooms that can help us reach many more of the approximately 50 million immigrants in the United States. In parallel, Documented continues its unwavering commitment to deepening and growing our work in New York through innovative investigations, audience engagement and responsive journalism with the city’s three largest immigrant groups: Spanish-speaking, Chinese-speaking and Caribbean communities — and to document our continued learnings.
This new national initiative will support independent news websites, radio stations, alternative weeklies and other forms of local media across the country to better meet the needs of new audiences. It will focus on building reader, listener and viewership among the millions of immigrants not currently served by traditional, quality journalism, as well as lifting up their perspectives and points of view.
Between 2025 and 2028, Documented will support 20 newsrooms across the country in innovating journalism for local immigrant communities in their languages. Documented will train these newsrooms to understand their local immigrant communities’ needs, support their editorial processes and the way they communicate and build engagement and support for this work, and, as needed, help them develop new products and platforms to better serve their local communities.
This work will be led by Documented’s Chief Product, Education and Research Officer Nicólás Rios. Nico is an expert in digital media innovation and one of Documented’s first team members. He will be building out the national capacity building team and leading this body of work. Since 2019, Nico has guided Documented’s listening projects and built new products in response, carrying out in-depth research with thousands of Latino, Chinese and Caribbean New Yorkers and developing original two-way platforms to directly connect with readers for WhatsApp, WeChat and Nextdoor.
These platforms represent some of the most innovative efforts to engage and center immigrant communities and to ensure that they have access to quality news on the platforms they use.
If you are interested in learning more about Documented’s national training programs, please be in touch by filling out this form. We will be back in touch in early 2025.
