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Q&A with Mazin Sidahmed of Documented

Mazin Sidahmed is co-executive director of Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City. He was a 2021 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sidahmed returned to Wallace House in September to deliver the 37th annual Graham Hovey Lecture. Before the event, he spoke with Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House, about starting Documented.

In a city like New York, how did you determine which communities to serve and how to reach them?

We were super naive at the start. We thought the only reason the publications we’d worked at previously weren’t reaching low-wage immigrants, or the immigrants who were at the center of the stories, was that those publications weren’t translating their stories. We thought that if we just translated, published and tweeted out our stories, everyone would find them.

And when you realized that wasn’t going to work, what did you do?

We actually went to Spanish-speaking communities in New York City — predominantly immigrant Spanish- speaking communities — and asked them: “Where do you get your news? What kind of news and information do you want? What kind of news and information would be useful to you?” That’s what led us to build our first news product, our WhatsApp news service.

And now you publish in Spanish on WhatsApp. And you also publish in Chinese on WeChat, and in Haitian Creole on Nextdoor. That’s very tailored news delivery to specific communities. How has that changed your editorial structure?

In order to get the model to where we needed it to be, we created a newsroom role called community
correspondent. It’s part reporter, part product manager, part community engagement. Our Spanish-speaking community correspondent spends about a third of his day on WhatsApp replying to people’s messages, hearing from people, trying to understand their interests, replying to their questions and
bringing those insights into editorial meetings. So if a bunch of people say they had issues with their utility bills, he’ll report a story on that.

I imagine it’s not the kind of journalism you thought you’d be doing when you started.

It took a lot of soul-searching to get to where we let the communities lead on what they wanted us to do. The things that I’ve been trained to reach for or valorize were not necessarily aligned with what the community wanted. But when we actually listened to the community, the readership went up. People read those stories. They were shared and had traction in the communities we wanted to reach.

You’ve also done some deeply meaningful investigative work, including an investigation with ProPublica that uncovered more than 13,000 wage theft cases, totaling more than $203 million in stolen wages, from more than 127,000 New York workers.

We did a listening tour, and every community group that we went to speak to wanted to talk about wage theft. That was the problem that was at the top of people’s minds. So [my co-founder] Max Siegelbaum thought, “How can we put our investigative muscle toward creating something useful to the community?”

He decided to create a database of all the companies in New York state that had been convicted of stealing wages. He thought it would be straightforward for the state to give him the names of the companies. It ended up being a four-year lawsuit against the New York State Department of Labor. Our stories led to legislation introduced in the New York State Legislature that uses our database to set guidelines for how wage theft should be prosecuted. So that’s an example of how you go from listening to a community to powerful investigative journalism.

You applied for and received the fellowship during the Covid-19 pandemic. How did the fellowship help you move forward with your work?

I was at that stage that most founders get to when they realize they really need to focus on the business and operation side. There’s this dream, you know, that you’ll hire a person so you can do the fun stuff you always dreamed of doing. You’ll hire someone to be the adult in the room and take care of the business and the operations. But you quickly realize that no one can speak as authentically to your work as you can, and you can’t give up those decisions to an outside party. It became clear to me — maybe even a year before I started the fellowship — that I should take on that role. But I was in denial because it felt like the end of my journalism career, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

Did the need to focus on the business side of Documented lead to an identity crisis?

Yeah. I was having an identity crisis that year going into the fellowship. Having that space and time and the community of other Fellows to talk through what this might mean for me, to reflect on it and hear from other people who have gone through similar journeys and transformations helped me. And a lot of my long conversations with you. It made me come to terms with the fact that it’s what Documented needed. And it’s something I’m good at, and that’s okay.

What advice would you give to someone thinking about starting a community-focused news organization in Ohio, Indiana, or somewhere very removed from the networks and resources in New York?

Start by fully understanding the problem that you’re trying to solve. If you have an inherent feeling of what your community needs, go out, make a case and try to prove it. Find somebody who has a skill set different from yours, someone who complements you in some way, and build together. Then, find a community of other folks who are doing a similar thing. Building community with other leaders around the country will help you get through the hard times. Always keep your North Star, and keep in touch with the people who will be impacted by your work.

Mazin Sidahmed is a 2021 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

This interview appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the Wallace House Journal.

Q&A with Anna Clark of ProPublica

The annual Graham Hovey Lecture was started by Charles Eisendrath in 1987 in honor of his predecessor Graham Hovey, director of the fellowship program from 1980 to 1986, to recognize a Knight-Wallace journalist whose career exemplifies the benefits of a fellowship and whose ensuing work is at the forefront of our national conversations. This year we welcomed Anna Clark, a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow and currently a journalist with ProPublica living in Detroit. She is the author of “The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy,” which won the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is a nonfiction faculty member in Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and was also a Fulbright fellow in creative writing in Kenya. Anna sat down with director Lynette Clemetson to discuss the dangers of a culture of secrecy and what it takes to push back.

Q: When I raised the idea of government transparency to you as a possible topic for your Hovey Lecture, I was concerned that you might think it was too wonky, but you were all in.

A: Freedom of information and public disclosure policies are part of our architecture for democracy and justice. I’m very passionate about it.

Q: Many people don’t know that Michigan ranks low in some areas of transparency.

A: I love this state, but I am sorry to say that we are not on the strongest side of this issue. We’re notable for being one of only two states in which the legislature and the governor’s office are exempt from public records requests.

Q: It comes up for debate regularly, but the law hasn’t changed.

A: Well, interestingly, whatever party is not in power is really pro opening things up, and then once they are in power, they hesitate. (Laughs.) So yeah, people have been talking about this for years and years. And it has real stakes for the ability of reporters to do their jobs and for people to know what’s going on in their communities.

Q: For large institutions that get a lot of requests, public universities included, it can be easy to think of FOIA as a nuisance. How do we change that?

A: It’s true. Not every FOIA request is made in the name of democracy. There are frivolous requests, harassing ones, excessive ones, overly vague and broad ones that are a genuine burden to our public officials. Still, I think it is a virtue that you aren’t required to give a reason to make a request. If you’re an official who is doing the right thing, if you’re educating people, serving this state, this nation, in important ways, that should be evident in the details of the released records. Not making them available, even when you’re doing the right things, cultivates a kind of secrecy that breeds suspicion and distrust.

Q: There’s been a lot written about how a lack of government transparency exacerbated the water disaster in Flint. You document the downfalls in your book, “The Poisoned City.” You also recently wrote about a lack of transparency in a different part of the state—the ongoing wait for an external review of the 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School. How do larger government transparency issues relate to the situation in Oxford?

A: The Oxford school shooting in November 2021 was a very different kind of crisis than Flint. What’s similar is that the people in Oxford are starved for a clear, comprehensive telling of what happened, not just in the courts, which are prosecuting the shooter and his parents, but in the context of their school and the public school district that had a number of interactions with the shooter in the days and hours leading up to the shooting.

If you have a culture where the attitude is “just trust us” and you expect people to be okay with it, that trickles down to even the most locally elected, part-time, volunteer school board officials, who nonetheless are responsible for high-stakes decisions that could potentially cost people their lives. We’re creating a norm that is actually dangerous where this culture of secrecy is something we’re familiar with. That doesn’t mean it needs to be our normal.

Q: How did the fellowship prepare you to tackle this issue of government secrecy, starting with your book on Flint?

A: Well, I was a completely fried, burned out, single, full-time freelancer working all the time and feeling increasingly depleted. Without the fellowship, I don’t know how I would have emotionally been able to sustain the work of reporting and writing the book, let alone the emotional toll. Having fun with people, sleeping more, not worrying about my bills all the time, it was so restorative. And that was essential to help me go forward to finish this book and bring it into the world.

Q: What did you gain from the university?

A: It was a powerful opportunity to come at the book with resources and tools I just never had before. I took classes in the law school on water policy and environmental justice. I took an urban planning class on metropolitan structures. Visiting cities in Brazil and South Korea gave me a new perspective to think about how cities in the U.S. are made and unmade. Not having any institutional affiliation or much money when I came to the fellowship, I never had access to archives like that. Suddenly, I got this university email address and all the resources of the campus libraries, including the library at the U-M’s Flint campus, became available.

Q: And yet, you didn’t come into the fellowship with a concrete plan for what you were going to do. That makes a lot of people nervous. What advice would you give to current or future fellows who worry about having everything mapped out?

A: Some of it is just trusting yourself. Like, if you have a Tuesday, and you don’t have any classes at all, you can trust that things will show up on that day that you will learn and grow from, including just empty space, which might be the thing you need most of all.

Q: That can be a hard case to make when people’s careers feel so perilous and the industry is under so much pressure.

A: The toll this work takes—even in the best of times, let alone in these times of scarcity and threat—is so excruciating. If people are going to do this work for years and decades, well, people are not machines. We’re not machines. You need to replenish yourself. We need journalists who are whole people, who have the internal and external resources to sustain themselves for the long run. This program is so rare for truly investing in journalists, not just in what they produce. That’s an investment in journalism for the long term, not just the news cycle.

Anna Clark is a 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellow.

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Wallace House Journal.