Training Newsrooms to Serve Immigrant Communities

Mazin Sidahmed is co-founder of Documented, a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on reporting with and for immigrant communities.

María Arce recently joined Documented as a program manager, leading national training and capacity-building work.

Documented is known for approaching immigrants through a circular journalism model. Rather than reporting on or about immigrant communities in New York City, we start by listening to and understanding their needs — an ongoing process that drives the entire editorial wheel. After receiving more than 100 requests from newsrooms nationwide wanting to learn about our approach, Documented thought it was time to start a training program.

Although conceived years earlier, the launch of our training program coincided with the recent ramp-up in targeting immigrant communities around the country. As a result, newsrooms are scrambling to cover changing policies and also connect with impacted communities.

We believe that the traditional linear journalism approach, in which reporters and editors decide what their audiences want, is obsolete. It is especially limiting when covering immigrant communities, because most reporters and editors making decisions hold a passport or work visa and have no experience with the critical concerns of the people they are covering.

We want to help journalists represent immigrants fairly, free from stereotypes and oversimplifications, providing journalism that helps them make informed decisions.

Last March, Carlos, a community member in New York, reached out with an urgent question: “Is it safe to attend my court hearing?” His friends warned him not to go, and his consulate offered no clear guidance.

We published an explainer on the consequences of missing court and an investigation, incorporating Carlos’ situation and expert sources. We made clear that we are not legal advisors or advocates. But pursuing a full and nuanced answer to Carlos’ question allowed us to address the needs of many immigrants like him.

The circular model’s success depends not on merely recruiting bilingual talent but also on partnering with bicultural thinkers who are part of immigrant communities and are trusted by them. At Documented, we employ a trusted community correspondent, and it was this person that Carlos shared his question with. This approach demands daily persistence, with trust as the bridge that enables us to provide the information our audience needs. It also calls for redefining roles and updating workflows to embed the circular model throughout the entire reporting process.

We are hopeful that newsrooms will step up and work with us to reimagine their approach and presence in people’s lives and neighborhoods, and that in doing so, both journalism and the communities they serve will emerge stronger.

This article is part of Rising to Meet the Moment, a series from the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal, featuring reflections from Knight-Wallace alumni, Wallace House board members and the Livingston Awards community on meeting today’s challenges with focus, resilience and resolve. Read more stories from our series:

Christopher Baxter, “Unexpected hope“

Lynette Clemetson, “Stepping up with focus and resolve“

Hayes Ferguson, “Nurturing innovation, adaptability and purpose“

Stephen Henderson, “Choosing civility“

Samantha Henry, “The future of our profession: student journalism“

Tracy Jan, “News deserts and fewer watchdogs“

Margaret Low, “Game Over? Not a chance“

Peggy Lowe, “Defunded, but not defeated“

Amy Maestas, “Building trust through community collaborations“

Kunal Majumder, “Defending the right to report“

Seema Mehta, “Why we keep reporting“

Rachel Rohr, “Swift action for the hardest hit“

Gerard Ryle, “We will not retreat“

Laura Santhanam, “Preserving knowledge“

Mazin Sidahmed and Maria Arce, “Training newsrooms to serve immigrant communities“

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Bending without breaking: resilience in academia“

Thomas Zurbuchen, “Never let a good challenge go to waste“

Defunded, but Not Defeated

Peggy Lowe is an investigative reporter based at KCUR in Kansas City.

My time in the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, as it was designed to do, helped me write my second act. After years at a wire service and newspapers in Colorado and California, I decided during my 2008-2009 academic year at the University of Michigan to return to the Midwest, where I grew up, and move into public media. I wanted to trade the downward, depressing slide of newspapers for the hope and growth I saw at NPR and its emerging collaborations.

I landed at Harvest Public Media, which was then just six Midwest stations based at KCUR in Kansas City and among the first regional collaborations launched with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). I helped build a startup focused on covering the changing world of food production, energy and climate change, health determinants and rural life.

What I didn’t anticipate was that my new job would land me at ground zero on the map of media deserts — those vast spaces where fewer and fewer communities were being covered with daily news. I was proud as hell that public media had stepped up while traditional print media was running away. Public media committed to creating new models to fill the geographic gaps, hiring more reporters and covering the middle of the country for national audiences.

I remain committed to the goals I created as a Knight-Wallace Fellow — most importantly, doing investigative reporting on local issues with a focus on social justice.

Harvest has become a mighty force, now fueled by the connection of 23 stations, serving as a model for other reporting collaborations, such as the Kansas News Service and NPR’s Midwest Newsroom, both of which are based at KCUR.

But since the defunding of CPB, all of this reporting from the middle of America is in jeopardy. And that’s a shame. A listener who recently started donating to KCUR urged others to join him, saying our reporters showed up when other outlets failed to, and that the depth and accuracy of the reporting is “unmatched.”

“I get to hear interviews not just from local public officials I like, but also a lot who I disagree with, and always with fair but challenging questions,” the new donor wrote. “We need a lot more of that in society.”

While KCUR will be fine, thanks mostly to our generous hometown, many smaller stations that relied on the federal funding will close, diluting these well-built collaborations and drying up this much-needed coverage from reporting deserts.

In spite of the crisis, I know public media will remain a force. Funders are coming forward, new business models are being built, and in the meantime, we continue to cover our communities with gusto. I remain committed to the goals I created as a Knight-Wallace Fellow — most importantly, doing investigative reporting on local issues with a focus on social justice. And I choose to believe what has become a mantra at KCUR: “Defunded, but not defeated.”

This article is part of Rising to Meet the Moment, a series from the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal, featuring reflections from Knight-Wallace alumni, Wallace House board members and the Livingston Awards community on meeting today’s challenges with focus, resilience and resolve. Read more stories from our series:

Christopher Baxter, “Unexpected hope“

Lynette Clemetson, “Stepping up with focus and resolve“

Hayes Ferguson, “Nurturing innovation, adaptability and purpose“

Stephen Henderson, “Choosing civility“

Samantha Henry, “The future of our profession: student journalism“

Tracy Jan, “News deserts and fewer watchdogs“

Margaret Low, “Game Over? Not a chance“

Peggy Lowe, “Defunded, but not defeated“

Amy Maestas, “Building trust through community collaborations“

Kunal Majumder, “Defending the right to report“

Seema Mehta, “Why we keep reporting“

Rachel Rohr, “Swift action for the hardest hit“

Gerard Ryle, “We will not retreat“

Laura Santhanam, “Preserving knowledge“

Mazin Sidahmed and Maria Arce, “Training newsrooms to serve immigrant communities“

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Bending without breaking: resilience in academia“

Thomas Zurbuchen, “Never let a good challenge go to waste“

Building Trust Through Community Collaborations

Amy Maestas is director of the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub at Montclair State University.

I’m motivated and inspired by the ongoing evolution of journalism in all ways, but especially collaborative journalism. At the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub, where I am director, we are building on the success of journalism collaboratives in the United States. In the last six years, I’ve helped catalyze and support journalism collaboratives of varying sizes and in a variety of places. During my KnightWallace Fellowship, I studied how to inspire and lead innovation in news organizations amid constant disruption.

When collaboratives work, they can achieve what no single news organization could do alone. They include community and civic organizations in their work, which expands the reach of their journalism, fills gaps in coverage, builds trust and delivers storytelling in innovative ways.

In Dallas, a choral ensemble writes and performs songs based on Dallas Media Collaborative’s stories about housing affordability and equity. In Wichita, collaborative partners host community fairs that include organizations focused on youth mental health. In Salt Lake City, young people are creating zines to educate their peers about the shrinking Great Salt Lake — work led by the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. In fact, that same collaborative used their journalism to develop an education curriculum for fifth-grade public school students.

These examples illustrate how journalism collaboratives can orient around the needs of their communities and create a community-first value system. They contribute to the evolution of local information ecosystems; their journalism becomes more accessible and better represents people’s lived experiences. When community members begin to see themselves reflected in local media, they often develop a sense of agency and are motivated to take action — and with it, often come changes in their attitudes toward local journalism.

In collaboratives, news organizations are no longer doing business as usual; they have adopted a mindset that lets go of traditional journalistic paradigms. They are building resiliency and the capacity to adapt to change and disruption. They have moved past the well-worn storylines about “resource-strapped” newsrooms or stories about how one ingenious person came to the rescue after the closure of a news organization.

These successes have not been easy. Working together productively and authentically is difficult. Being sustainable is even harder. But the list of journalism collaboratives is expanding, and the resources to support them are building. The Hub was just launched in January, but I believe we were created specifically for this moment.

This article is part of Rising to Meet the Moment, a series from the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal, featuring reflections from Knight-Wallace alumni, Wallace House board members and the Livingston Awards community on meeting today’s challenges with focus, resilience and resolve. Read more stories from our series:

Christopher Baxter, “Unexpected hope“

Lynette Clemetson, “Stepping up with focus and resolve“

Hayes Ferguson, “Nurturing innovation, adaptability and purpose“

Stephen Henderson, “Choosing civility“

Samantha Henry, “The future of our profession: student journalism“

Tracy Jan, “News deserts and fewer watchdogs“

Margaret Low, “Game Over? Not a chance“

Peggy Lowe, “Defunded, but not defeated“

Amy Maestas, “Building trust through community collaborations“

Kunal Majumder, “Defending the right to report“

Seema Mehta, “Why we keep reporting“

Rachel Rohr, “Swift action for the hardest hit“

Gerard Ryle, “We will not retreat“

Laura Santhanam, “Preserving knowledge“

Mazin Sidahmed and Maria Arce, “Training newsrooms to serve immigrant communities“

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Bending without breaking: resilience in academia“

Thomas Zurbuchen, “Never let a good challenge go to waste“

Defending the Right to Report

Kunāl Majumder is Asia-Pacific program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

In April, as my fellowship ended, I felt an urgency to return to work. In my cohort of 18 Knight-Wallace Fellows, most of my peers were reporters, editors and producers. I was somewhat of an outlier, working on press freedom and the safety of journalists. That distinction itself reflects how the profession is changing: defending the right to report has become as urgent as reporting itself.

During the academic year that I spent at the University of Michigan, the global press freedom crisis only grew sharper. A record number of journalists were killed in 2024 — 125 by the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) count, most of that number driven by journalists targeted in Gaza. Last year was the deadliest year since CPJ began keeping track more than three decades ago.

Journalists today can no longer take their rights or safety for granted — not only in authoritarian countries or conflict zones, but even in democracies like my own India, or the United States.

In India, press freedom is under sustained pressure. Journalists face criminalization, misuse of security laws, and police investigations designed to intimidate them. Media capture has become a reality. Spyware and digital censorship, particularly on social media, add new layers of surveillance and silencing. Although fewer journalists are currently in jail compared with previous years, many continue to face criminal charges. The harassment does not end with being released from prison, and the struggle to clear one’s name is exhausting and unending.

The role of the United States in upholding free speech and press freedom has always been crucial. Yet in recent years, successive administrations have prioritized security and trade over democratic values. In 2024, journalists in the U.S. were arrested or detained at least 48 times. This year, the threats have grown even sharper, with incidents such as the arrest and deportation of reporter Mario Guevara; the visa cancellation of student journalist Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed; multimillion-dollar media settlements that encourage self-censorship; and the shutdown of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

As I said in a TEDx talk during my fellowship, press freedom lies at the heart of all democratic freedoms. Attacks on journalists mark a democratic decline and rising authoritarianism, often justified under security or other pretexts. In India, for instance, anti-terror laws have been misused to try to jail journalists, including 2023 Knight-Wallace Fellow Masrat Zahra, who faced prison time for her reporting from Indian-administered Kashmir. She is currently in exile in the U.S.

At CPJ, my work revolves around documenting attacks, pressing for accountability and assisting those under threat. Safety training has also become central to this mission. During my Knight-Wallace Fellowship, I developed an augmented-reality prototype with my fellowship classmate, Katie O’Brien, to help prepare journalists for hostile environments. The idea came from recognizing that risks to safety are no longer limited to conflict zones. The fellowship gave me space to imagine solutions. The world I return to demands action.

This article is part of Rising to Meet the Moment, a series from the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal, featuring reflections from Knight-Wallace alumni, Wallace House board members and the Livingston Awards community on meeting today’s challenges with focus, resilience and resolve. Read more stories from our series:

Christopher Baxter, “Unexpected hope“

Lynette Clemetson, “Stepping up with focus and resolve“

Hayes Ferguson, “Nurturing innovation, adaptability and purpose“

Stephen Henderson, “Choosing civility“

Samantha Henry, “The future of our profession: student journalism“

Tracy Jan, “News deserts and fewer watchdogs“

Margaret Low, “Game Over? Not a chance“

Peggy Lowe, “Defunded, but not defeated“

Amy Maestas, “Building trust through community collaborations“

Kunal Majumder, “Defending the right to report“

Seema Mehta, “Why we keep reporting“

Rachel Rohr, “Swift action for the hardest hit“

Gerard Ryle, “We will not retreat“

Laura Santhanam, “Preserving knowledge“

Mazin Sidahmed and Maria Arce, “Training newsrooms to serve immigrant communities“

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Bending without breaking: resilience in academia“

Thomas Zurbuchen, “Never let a good challenge go to waste“

News Deserts and Fewer Watchdogs

Tracy Jan is a senior editor for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, where she partners with local news outlets on investigative projects.

Headlines about the state of local journalism are bleak.

More than 3,000 newspapers have folded in the last 20 years. Of those that remain, private equity firms have stripped many of their investigative firepower. The number of news deserts is growing.

The result? Less-informed voters and taxpayers, and fewer professional watchdogs reporting on city councils, school boards and state governments, scrutinizing power and uncovering malfeasance.

Those stakes have driven me to return to local journalism, where I began my career more than two decades ago covering the county courthouse and the sheriff’s department at The Oregonian. I spent the last 13 years as a national reporter and editor for The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. When ProPublica offered me the opportunity to collaborate with local news outlets on investigative stories as a senior editor for our Local Reporting Network, I saw no more urgent mission.

Since January, I have worked with reporters and editors from legacy publications like The Salt Lake Tribune and the Bangor Daily News, as well as nonprofit newcomers including MLK50 in Memphis, The Current in Savannah, Verite News in New Orleans and The Frontier in Oklahoma. We’ve examined how the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program is failing Georgians, how criminal justice laws championed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry are keeping people in prison longer, and how government programs meant to help low-income renters and homeowners contribute to Maine’s homelessness crisis.

Our partnership model demonstrates that the future of local news is stronger when we work together. And so is our democracy.

One of my favorite parts of the job is visiting reporters and their newsrooms to better understand their communities and the nuances of the issues they will be spending a year covering. I’ve listened to whistleblowers recount the failures of Oklahoma’s oil and gas regulators and toured oil fields to witness the resulting environmental damage. These reporting trips have made me a more effective editor, fueling questions that have helped the reporters sharpen their reporting goals and think even more ambitiously.

Visiting our partner newsrooms has also given me a fuller understanding of the new media landscape. There is promise in the startups that have sprung up to fill the holes left by shrinking or shuttered legacy papers.

Our partnership model demonstrates that the future of local news is stronger when we work together.

And so is our democracy.

This article is part of Rising to Meet the Moment, a series from the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal, featuring reflections from Knight-Wallace alumni, Wallace House board members and the Livingston Awards community on meeting today’s challenges with focus, resilience and resolve. Read more stories from our series:

Christopher Baxter, “Unexpected hope“

Lynette Clemetson, “Stepping up with focus and resolve“

Hayes Ferguson, “Nurturing innovation, adaptability and purpose“

Stephen Henderson, “Choosing civility“

Samantha Henry, “The future of our profession: student journalism“

Tracy Jan, “News deserts and fewer watchdogs“

Margaret Low, “Game Over? Not a chance.“

Peggy Lowe, “Defunded, but not defeated“

Amy Maestas, “Building trust through community collaborations“

Kunal Majumder, “Defending the right to report“

Seema Mehta, “Why we keep reporting“

Rachel Rohr, “Swift action for the hardest hit“

Gerard Ryle, “We will not retreat“

Laura Santhanam, “Preserving knowledge“

Mazin Sidahmed and Maria Arce, “Training newsrooms to serve immigrant communities“

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Bending without breaking: resilience in academia“

Thomas Zurbuchen, “Never let a good challenge go to waste“

We Will Not Retreat

Gerard Ryle is executive director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which produced the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Pandora Papers.

I used to think the hardest part of journalism was prying loose facts others worked hard to conceal. And it is hard — buried documents, money routed through endless, shady paths, lawyers hired to bury the trail and corporate filings engineered to confuse. But over time, I’ve learned there’s another challenge just as steep: getting the resources to do the work.

Around the world, journalism is shrinking at the moment we need it most. When budgets are slashed, investigative reporting, which takes the longest and costs the most to produce, is the first to go.

At the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), we feel these pressures all the time. We’ve had to stretch every dollar further and dip into our reserves. But we’ve made a deliberate choice: We will not retreat. And we’re finding ways to do more.

We see ICIJ not just as a newsroom but as part of a larger media ecosystem. And when that ecosystem is under strain, our responsibility is to strengthen it, not pull back. Even in these lean times, we’ve doubled down to help others survive.

We continue sharing the technology we built to handle massive data leaks. We resist the lone-wolf style of journalism by offering scoops to small newsrooms without the resources to find them on their own. And we keep training reporters so they can carry out this kind of work in their own countries and languages.

Just this year, we trained hundreds of journalists, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the secure, collaborative methods we created. The training took many forms: individual mentoring, small group seminars, onboarding sessions for new partners, full-semester courses at Dortmund University in Germany and presentations at major industry gatherings.

The model we’ve built ensures no single government or institution can suppress the story.

Strengthening other newsrooms fortifies the ecosystem. It’s how we make sure investigative journalism can weather financial strain, adapt to new challenges, withstand political pressure and remain a force for accountability wherever it’s practiced.

If this way of working sounds familiar, it should. It’s the model we used a decade ago when the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers showed the world what happens when collaboration meets secrecy head-on. We brought together 376 journalists from 70 countries to produce the biggest journalistic investigation the world had ever seen. Every project since — from 2017’s Paradise Papers to this year’s China Targets — was built on this foundation, evolving to take on ever more complex forms of secrecy.

The model we’ve built ensures no single government or institution can suppress the story.

Three factors keep this work going: the courage of whistleblowers who share information with us despite the risks; the grit of journalists who won’t stop digging; and our belief that reporters working together can withstand forces working against transparency.

Our investigations led to the ousting of four world leaders and changed laws in more than 70 countries. They helped governments claw back billions in taxes and exposed hidden wealth on a scale the world had never seen. Along the way, we built a new model of journalism that others are now using, too.

The path to that impact runs through Wallace House. My fellowship in 2005-2006 provided the rare gift of time to think differently about how journalism could be done. I came to see that while traditional journalism has its place, collaboration across borders was needed to tell the biggest, most consequential stories.

Charles Eisendrath put my conviction to the test just a few years later with an invitation to apply to lead ICIJ. Charles was director of Wallace House and on the board of the Center for Public Integrity, which ICIJ was part of at the time. That call was a turning point, not just for me, but for the new model of journalism ICIJ would come to pioneer.

I’ve seen what happens when the truth gets out. Leaders step down. Loopholes close. And citizens are reminded of how free societies are supposed to work. The test now is whether we can equip the next generation to carry this torch and keep the truth alive.

This article is part of Rising to Meet the Moment, a series from the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal, featuring reflections from Knight-Wallace alumni, Wallace House board members and the Livingston Awards community on meeting today’s challenges with focus, resilience and resolve. Read more stories from our series:

Christopher Baxter, “Unexpected hope“

Lynette Clemetson, “Stepping up with focus and resolve“

Hayes Ferguson, “Nurturing innovation, adaptability and purpose“

Stephen Henderson, “Choosing civility“

Samantha Henry, “The future of our profession: student journalism“

Tracy Jan, “News deserts and fewer watchdogs“

Margaret Low, “Game Over? Not a chance“

Peggy Lowe, “Defunded, but not defeated“

Amy Maestas, “Building trust through community collaborations“

Kunal Majumder, “Defending the right to report“

Seema Mehta, “Why we keep reporting“

Rachel Rohr, “Swift action for the hardest hit“

Gerard Ryle, “We will not retreat“

Laura Santhanam, “Preserving knowledge“

Mazin Sidahmed and Maria Arce, “Training newsrooms to serve immigrant communities“

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Bending without breaking: resilience in academia“

Thomas Zurbuchen, “Never let a good challenge go to waste“

The 38th Graham hovey Lecture: Inside the firings and the Future of the Federal Workforce

Q&A with Andrea Hsu of NPR

Andrea Hsu is the labor and workplace correspondent for NPR, focusing on the evolving dynamics of work in the United States. As a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow, Hsu studied innovative approaches to health care awareness. She returned to Wallace House in September to deliver the 38th annual Graham Hovey Lecture. Before the event, Hsu spoke with Lynette Clemetson, director of Wallace House.

Clemetson: You started as a labor and workplace reporter during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the job was shaped by the pandemic. What was the focus of your beat when you started?

HSU: It started out as a temporary stint, filling in on the business desk in the fall of 2020, when a lot of office workers were working from home. Their offices had closed, and many schools were also closed. Working parents were figuring out what to do with their children. At the same time, there were the essential workers who had to keep things going – people working in grocery stores, hospitals, nursing homes and factories. It was a period of upheaval for all different types of workers.

When did it shift from being pandemic-driven to being focused on the federal workforce?

Not until this year. In fact, covering the federal workforce had never been part of my beat. Before January of this year, I think I had done maybe three stories on the federal workforce: one about the rollback of telework in the government, and two about federal employee unions.

But sometime between the election and the inauguration, a memo went out to staff announcing that I would be covering the federal workforce. This was a surprise to me! And then, as soon as Trump took office on January 20, he began signing executive orders that laid out huge changes for the federal workforce, and that took over my beat.

When did it shift from being pandemic-driven to being focused on the federal workforce?

Not until this year. In fact, covering the federal workforce had never been part of my beat. Before January of this year, I think I had done maybe three stories on the federal workforce: one about the rollback of telework in the government, and two about federal employee unions.

But sometime between the election and the inauguration, a memo went out to staff announcing that I would be covering the federal workforce. This was a surprise to me! And then, as soon as Trump took office on January 20, he began signing executive orders that laid out huge changes for the federal workforce, and that took over my beat.

I was really struck by how worried these people were, not just about their own jobs security, but about what would happen to the work they were doing.

So were federal workers expecting change?

There were ideas from Trump’s first term that he reintroduced. Some of them were in Project 2025. Still,
it was the speed at which this all happened that was surprising to people. On January 28, eight days after the inauguration, an email went out inviting almost the entire federal workforce to resign. More than 2 million people got this email. There was a lot of confusion over whether the offer was legal or if it was even real. Shortly after that, in the middle of February, federal agencies started firing probationary employees en masse. Those were mostly people in their first or second year on the job, fired supposedly for performance reasons, even though many had stellar performance reviews.

My colleagues and I began getting all kinds of messages from federal workers — emails, LinkedIn messages, and mostly Signal messages. Many federal workers were scared to speak out but were very willing to send screenshots of communications they were getting as they tried to make sense of what was happening.

The public messaging was that it was about cleaning out waste in Washington. Who were you hearing from?

The people contacting me were from all over the country, largely not in Washington. In fact, 80% to 85% of federal workers don’t live in the Washington, D.C. area. That often comes as a surprise to people. I was hearing from people in Georgia, Utah, Alaska — all over the country.

What did you learn from that flood of messages?

I was really struck by how worried these people were, not just about their own job security, but about what would happen to the work they were doing. These are people who feel a deep sense of responsibility to the public.

I imagine some of their jobs are not visible to the general public at all.

Yes. For example, one woman worked for the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Logan, Utah. She was a Ph.D. scientist, and her job was helping alfalfa farmers in Washington state. She was helping them manage pests in their alfalfa fields. The farmers she was working with grow alfalfa for seed, which is then used as feed for the U.S. dairy industry, which supplies our milk. The reason the government pays a researcher like her to be out there helping these farmers is that her work is seen as critical to America’s food supply. I heard from many people like this who took the time to explain these things to me.

What will the reductions look like by the end of this year?

According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, by the end of December, the federal workforce will be down roughly 300,000, to about 2.1 million employees. So that’s about one in eight federal workers out by the end of the year. Many of those leaving are people with a lot of experience, so
there is worry about the loss of institutional knowledge.

What are you watching going forward?

The push by the Trump administration to turn much more of the federal workforce into “at will” employees. The administration has argued that the president needs to be able to remove those who are unwilling to help him fulfill the promises he made to the American people. Currently, only about 4,000 federal employees, out of more than 2 million, are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. The rest enjoy civil service protections, designed to give the federal government stability and continuity through changeovers in administration. Upending this system would really change the nature of the federal workforce. Ultimately, this will come down to the Supreme Court to decide.

Andrea Hsu was a 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellow

This interview appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of the Wallace House Journal.

The 37th Graham Hovey Lecture: Sorting Immigration Facts from Fiction and the Power of Local Reporting Amid National Politics

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.

Clemetson: You describe Documented as a community-driven news organization. What’s the difference between community-driven news and local news?

Sidahmed: When you’re community-driven, you’re
thinking about what kind of news and information will serve your local community best. How can we be good neighbors and actually make this a better place for all of us to live? To accomplish that, we have to listen and ask the community what they need from us and let those needs drive our decision-making, as opposed to business incentives driving our decisions.

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.

A September tradition at Wallace House: More than 200 guests gathered in the Wallace House gardens to hear Mazin Sidahmed deliver the 37th Hovey Lecture.

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.

Engaging Gen Z in the Era of Algorithmic News Consumption

Lessons from a Knight-Wallace Fellow

Over time, I’ve become increasingly enthralled by how news reaches people. As the media landscape has changed, so have the ways people engage with news. Rather than fight a losing battle to keep news consumers where they were, I’ve followed their transition from print to digital, from static images to short-form videos. These shifts dictated my path from photographer to photo editor, to social media director at National Geographic, and, recently, to Knight-Wallace Fellow.

While working at TIME and National Geographic, I noticed a problem. We knew which content performed well on social media but didn’t fully understand what brought the content through the platforms’ algorithms and into users’ feeds. The issue wasn’t just who liked our content but who never got to see it. This disproportionately affected younger generations, who are the future of social media and the future of journalism.

They receive most of their news from social media platforms, which are served to them algorithmically by individual creators — not traditional news sources. Younger audiences no longer actively choose their news; instead, algorithms largely choose it for them.

What better place to try to tackle this issue than a campus full of Gen Z students? Early on, the Wallace House staff connected me with professors at the University of Michigan School of Information: Sarita Schoenebeck, Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick. I started with general coursework but soon focused on marketing and leadership at the Ross School of Business. This helped me better understand the intersection between business and tech within the media landscape.

When I wasn’t taking business classes or attending Wallace House seminars, I collaborated with Professor Resnick to study students’ social media habits. Rather than asking students about their social media usage, we had them share news-related videos from their feeds. What I found surprised me — in ways both discouraging and hopeful.

Josh Raab with fellow students at the University of Michigan School of Information.

Time and again, I’d been told that young people don’t care about news, that social media is rife with misinformation, and that little can be done about it. While some of that is true, here are a few of the findings that changed my thinking:

  • Young people care about the news and are getting more of it than ever on social media platforms. Seventy-five percent of the news stories students saw were new to them.
  • While misinformation and bias exist, Michigan students had a good barometer for bullshit. Trustworthiness scores for news videos rated by students and journalists were within 10% similarity on average.
  • Individual creators have surpassed traditional media accounts. Fifty-four percent of the news videos weren’t from traditional sources — and students tended to trust creators more.
  • Seventeen percent of the news-related videos covered local news — making algorithmic social media a potential resource as traditional local news outlets face sharp declines.
  • The vast majority of news videos came from accounts that students did not follow. Students said they wanted more news on social media but were unsure who to follow for reliable content.

This all presents an interesting opportunity. Younger demographics are consuming more news than ever, and it’s increasingly coming from social news creators like Dylan Page, Jessica Burbank or Weather With Peyton. These creators are effective but often lack the journalistic support of traditional newsrooms.

The stimulation of my fellowship year and the quiet calm of Ann Arbor have been replaced by a new job at Google and the cacophony of New York City sirens. Still, the fellowship year and my findings continue to inform my thinking. I remain grateful for the experience — and just a little jealous of the current fellows floating around Ann Arbor, looking forward to their next seminar or planning a group outing to a football game or expedition to Detroit. In the future, I hope to launch a platform to connect news creators with journalists, provide fact-based news, combat misinformation and better reach social media consumers.

Josh Raab is a senior manager at Google, where he heads social strategy for Android, Google Chrome and Google Play.

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

Dieu-Nalio Chery, Photojournalist, Finds Renewed Purpose in Documenting the Haitian Diaspora


A Knight-Wallace Press Freedom Fellow in Action

When Donald Trump used the national debate stage to amplify false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian photojournalist Dieu-Nalio Chery felt a mix of sadness and purpose.

“It’s painful for me to do a project on Haitians here [in the U.S.],” says Chery. “Haitians [in the U.S.] are suffering a lot. They are victims of racism. They are exploited. … Sometimes, when a community is underrepresented, the media will not spend money for a journalist to dig deeper. I feel that I can help with that.”

Chery grew up in the Haitian countryside and began working in his uncle’s photo studio in Port-au-Prince in his 20s. The powerful and heroic images that Chery captured throughout his ensuing two decades as a photojournalist — including 11 years working for The Associated Press — have become iconic records of 21st-century Haiti.

Much of Chery’s photography has focused on human rights issues — struggles of civilians living in slums, grassroots protest movements, government-perpetrated massacres of political opponents, the devastating aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and other natural disasters, the cholera epidemic, United Nations relief efforts and gang violence.

Chery’s most personally meaningful photography experience occurred in 2008, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. He accompanied a team of United Nations soldiers to save the lives of 35 children and teachers trapped in an orphanage surrounded by floodwaters. Despite not knowing how to swim, Chery waded in water up to his chin and carried children on his shoulders, one by one, to safety. He took moving photos throughout the successful rescue.

“We didn’t know if we would get out of that water,” Chery recalls. “It was crazy that day. I felt proud to be a part of that.”

Dieu-Nalio Chery standing infornt of a building displaying his photography
City of Asylum/Detroit projected Dieu-Nalio Chery’s photography onto the walls of its office building in Hamtramck, Michigan, as part of a September 2024 celebration of the Haitian community. Photo Credit: Joseph Sywenkyj

In 2019, while photographing the ratification ceremony of a newly appointed prime minister, Chery suffered an accidental gunshot wound to his jaw yet still managed to take an award-winning photograph that showed both the shooter — a Haitian senator — and the spent cartridges flying through the air.

In 2020, Chery was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for a series of searing photos taken during protests across Haiti that called for the resignation of then-President Jovenel Moïse. Two years later, Chery was targeted for assassination by a powerful Haitian gang and narrowly escaped, fleeing Haiti. He and his family are now cobbling together a new life in the United States and seeking asylum. Chery has earned multiple prestigious fellowships while freelancing for major outlets, including The New York Times, Reuters and The Washington Post.

One of Chery’s ongoing goals is to write the articles that accompany his photography. In 2022, he wrote a feature story and created a photo essay for The Washington Post titled “Vodou in Photos: How Followers of an Ancient Faith Are Battling Stereotypes.” In 2023, he co-authored and photographed a piece for The New York Times about gentrification in Miami’s “Little Haiti” neighborhood.

Chery’s Knight-Wallace Fellowship project is aimed at capturing the Haitian diaspora’s diversity and resilience — highlighting how the community has “endured, grown, struggled and thrived
across generations.”

He will supplement his photography with crowd-sourced family photos, as well as images found in attics, basements, churches and university libraries.

Community engagement is central to Chery’s approach. He gave a powerful guest lecture at a recent University of Michigan symposium on Haiti. He also shared his Haitian diaspora photography at a public exhibition organized by City of Asylum/ Detroit. The event was held outdoors in a public space to ensure inclusivity and community spirit. Chery’s photography was projected onto the walls of City of Asylum’s future office building while guests enjoyed a spread of Haitian food.

Chery hopes that his next exhibition will be in Springfield, Ohio — the sudden epicenter of a vitriolic national immigration debate and the home of more than 12,000 Haitian immigrants. Chery would love to present his work to Springfield residents, as well as create a photo essay of portraits alongside quotes and text that illuminate residents’ diverse stories.

He says: “I want to make something [in Springfield] that can help unite the community.”

Some of Dieu-Nalio Chery’s photography can be viewed at visura.co/dieunalio.

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

Ashley Bates is the Associate Director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships.