$1.5 million Press Forward award to test immigrant newsroom revenue models
When Allan Marrero, an asylum-seeker from the Cayman Islands, was released after five months in immigration detention, there was only one journalist he invited to his celebration: Eileen Grench, a reporter with Documented, an independent nonprofit news outlet in New York.
Grench had previously reported on Marrero, who was detained after interviewing with federal officials for a marriage-based green card. Beyond covering his detention struggles, she humanized him, emphasizing his and his husband’s love story.
“Most folks in these situations aren’t just victims; they’re fighting and being resilient and maintain the beautiful things about their life, too,” Grench said.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted Grench’s story upon Marrero’s release. “To see their story kind of lifted up on to that city stage was really gratifying,” Grench said.
Documented is among several immigrant-serving news outlets meeting readers on the platforms those readers already use — WhatsApp, WeChat, TikTok and SMS — particularly amid recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement surges. Last year, Documented, Conecta Arizona, the Bay Area’s El Tímpano, the Minneapolis-based Sahan Journal and the Listening Post Collective launched the Immigrant News Coalition. Their work has since been bolstered by a $1.5 million award from the Press Forward Foundation to test and spread effective revenue models for immigrant-serving newsrooms, and additional funding from Democracy Fund.
“The impacts are phenomenal for relatively new media outlets, and part of it is because they’re operating on such a hyper-local level,” said Angie Chuang, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Immigrant communities know what they need. They might not be able to access it or make it happen, but they can articulate their own needs. What these outlets are doing is just understanding how amplifying the community’s voices can help them.”
Through listening tours and research, the outlets found that members of immigrant communities in the United States do not always get news by visiting websites or reading push notifications, especially when English is not their first language. Instead, they rely on other platforms that may carry inaccurate information — including WhatsApp, which over half of Latinos in the US use, according to the coalition’s research.
Documented runs a Spanish-language WhatsApp group, a WeChat group for Chinese immigrants and a TikTok account in Haitian Creole to combat misinformation about ICE raids and fear-based scams.
“Misinformation thrives when there is a vacuum of good information, and immigrant communities are so vulnerable because of the lack of alternatives,” said Madeleine Bair, the founder of El Tímpano. “We’re not translating news into other languages. We’re creating news first and foremost for immigrant communities, and that looks very different than news created for non-immigrant communities.”
Emmy-winning journalist Maritza Félix started Conecta Arizona’s WhatsApp group, La Hora del Cafecito (Coffee Time), during the pandemic to provide timely, accurate news for immigrant communities in Spanish. The online gathering space, which has thousands of members across platforms, hosts a weekly question-and-answer session with expert guests, including immigration attorneys, education policy experts and labor rights specialists.
But as ICE raids have continued, members are engaging less in the public group chat and more in one-on-one direct messages with staff, Félix said. “They’re afraid of being a screenshot, or having their message forwarded to someone,” she said. “Listening to our community taught us that what works today might not work next week. We are listening to what they say and their silences at the same time.”
El Tímpano — Spanish for “eardrum” — uses SMS messaging to reach more than 7,000 Spanish-speaking immigrants. Its disinformation defense initiative, Comunidades Informadas, has trained more than 400 Latino immigrants in the Bay Area to recognize and address disinformation and misinformation.
“By equipping immigrants with an understanding of how disinformation works, it can empower them, so that when they see a rumor of an ICE raid, their immediate response isn’t to panic,” Bair said. “Instead, they can check with a source they trust or call their local rapid response hotline. We’ve received really positive responses to these workshops and to the information that we provide to combat that fear.”
In May, the Alameda County library partnered with El Tímpano for a disinformation defense workshop in Spanish via Zoom for its staff. Jaqueline Martinez, the library’s equity services coordinator, said the training gave her language she had previously lacked to discuss the topic with her own family.
“After going through the workshop, I was like, ‘I can talk to this with my tia and my tios, and explain it to them in the way that I didn’t really have the language before,’” Martinez said.
LA Taco, which is not part of the coalition, originally built trust among Los Angeles immigrant communities through coverage of food, culture and cannabis. Last June, as ICE raids swept through Los Angeles, LA Taco journalist Memo Torres began posting daily recaps of ICE activity on the publication’s Instagram account. By reporting verified information during a period of widespread misinformation, Torres became one of Los Angeles’s most trusted journalists for immigrant communities. LA Taco’s membership grew from 1,500 to 77,000, drawing attention from state and federal officials.
“I was getting information from people, I started reaching out to rapid responders and building trust with them, and then got included in the network with them,” Torres said, recalling how he started the Daily Memo.
Over the summer, the Daily Memo wound down, while LA Taco’s political cartoons by Pulitzer Prize finalist Ivan Ehlers, called Sunday Taquitos, took off. In July, his illustration about Flock camera surveillance received more than 7 million Instagram views and inspired fan-created versions in five different languages. Ehlers, an Ecuadorian American artist, said the political cartoons are his short-form way of fighting disinformation and misinformation.
“If I can get someone’s attention for five seconds, I can get people to look at important issues and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know that was happening. Oh man, this is terrible,’” Ehlers said. “People will go in and do more research, read more about it, talk to their friends or share it, and that’ll start conversations.”
Ehlers has also served as creative director for one of LA Taco’s zines, which showcases the outlet’s reporting on local protests and immigrant communities. The zine was released in early September and was one of many in-person events LA Taco has held this year to engage with readers.
“The bigger issue is building a community and building support systems and showing people that they’re not alone,” Ehlers added. “We have a lot of people who are willing to fight together, work together and build something together.”
For Documented, the coalition work builds on earlier investigations. In 2019, co-founders Mazin Sidahmed and Max Siegelbaum spoke with community organizations across New York concerned about workers’ wages being stolen. Joined later by reporter Lam Thuy Vo, they sought out New York state and federal wage data for four years, producing the Wage Theft Monitor. The investigation inspired New York state legislators to introduce three bills to prevent and punish wage theft.
“The dual impact of protecting immigrant workers, but also helping the general public understand how pervasive this issue is, has been one of the most rewarding parts of seeing this project come to light,” Sidahmed said.