The WeChat channel 纽约移民记事网Documented (or the New York Immigrant Chronicle) is part newsfeed and part public service. The channel, run by the nonprofit newsroom Documented NYC, is filled with local news for Chinese speakers in New York: stories about healthcare and immigration arrests, but also information on local events like toy giveaways, places where families can get free groceries, and affordable housing lottery listings. Followers can also contact reporters directly — to send them tips, of course, but followers also turn to Documented for essential questions: Where can I find free English classes? What should I expect at an upcoming court date? Should I travel as a green card holder?

For many newsrooms, WeChat isn’t the first place you’d think of to distribute news. But April Xu, who covers New York’s Chinese community, realized Documented needed to have a presence on it. Many immigrants coming to the US from China are already on WeChat, a platform that functions like an everything app, combining X, Facebook, Venmo, online shopping, news, financial services, and more. It’s semi-closed, meaning users can only see content from their contacts, and it’s an essential way for Chinese immigrants to stay in touch with family and friends.

“That’s why they’re still so sticky with this app,” Xu says. “But it’s provided us an ideal platform to reach out to those Chinese speaking immigrants.” Xu is in over 50 chat groups for New York’s Chinese community, each of which can have up to 500 members. She also runs a smaller Documented reader group chat.

Xu covers just one slice of the audience Documented hopes to reach. The nonprofit news outlet serves a range of immigrant communities in New York, with a special focus on producing work that immigrants can use: guides, how-tos, explainers, and more. More than a third of New Yorkers are immigrants, with the largest share being born in the Dominican Republic, China, and Jamaica. Documented stories are available in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Haitian Creole.

For years, mainstream news outlets have turned to tech platforms to disseminate information, bending to the will of third parties that played nice with publishers — until they didn’t. So deep is the media’s reliance on social media platforms that algorithm tweaks, shifting priorities, and changing political winds can crater newsrooms’ reach. When publishers need an intermediary platform to reach their audience, they don’t truly own the relationship. Documented thinks about reach differently. The outlet publishes on the web but also on specialized platforms — WeChat for Chinese speakers, WhatsApp for Spanish speakers, and Nextdoor for the Caribbean community.

Immigration has been one of the biggest stories of 2025, as the federal government has caught up thousands of immigrants — and even some US citizens — in its data-powered dragnet. But often, news that’s relevant to immigrant communities is inaccessible to the people who need it most, published only in English in outlets or on platforms that the community doesn’t use.

“Immigrants want information that is actionable in the languages that they speak and on the platforms that they’re on.”

“It would never serve them, and it wasn’t for them,” says Ethar El-Katatney, editor-in-chief of Documented. “For us, the big two things are: immigrants want information that is actionable in the languages that they speak and on the platforms that they’re on.”

This dedication to meeting immigrant audiences where they are permeates through Documented’s work. El-Katatney says reporters spend between three and six hours every week personally answering reader questions and are encouraged to spend time in the communities they cover. Understanding the media ecosystem for immigrants is also essential, because each community gets their news in slightly different ways, on different platforms, or through various mediums. In 2019, I wrote about Hmong Americans who got news via unofficial radio shows hosted on free conference call software. If you’re a journalist and want to reach the people you are writing about, you have to go where the community is.

For Ralph Thomassaint Joseph, who covers the Caribbean community for Documented, that means having a regular presence on Nextdoor, the neighborhood-based social platform; he learned through an audience survey that the platform was a key part of the community’s media ecosystem. Each week, he searches for keywords like “migrant” on the platform to see what local users are discussing and shares immigration-related news. Historically, Nextdoor hasn’t been a core part of newsrooms’ distribution channels: the neighborhood-level segmentation made it hard to reach a wide audience. Earlier this year, Nextdoor partnered with thousands of local news outlets to more prominently feature news articles among neighbors’ posts (Documented isn’t part of the program).

“When I started there as [a] journalist talking about federal policies, pushing news content, and reaching out to people in different neighborhoods, it was hard,” Joseph says. Many of his posts would get removed, he says, especially if they contained certain keywords like “Donald Trump” or “Joe Biden,” or that could be read as political. “The platform may estimate that the conversation may be too heated, and it creates friction in the neighborhoods, so they remove those posts.” The way to make the platform useful, Joseph realized, was to keep showing up so the community on Nextdoor began to recognize him as a Documented reporter. On the platform he is “Mr. Joseph,” El-Katatney says, a regular source for trusted information.

Because these alternative platforms are not built specifically for news outlets, there’s a certain degree of hacking Documented must do to make things work for them. Rommel Ojeda, who covers Latino communities for Documented, uses WhatsApp to communicate with Spanish-speaking communities — but soon found that the traditional broadcasting channels didn’t offer a tailored, direct experience for readers.

“When using a third-party platform, there are always a lot of limitations,” Ojeda says. “We learned that a lot of the time, those broadcasting channels only allow the people to respond with emojis or with little hearts. And like in any relationship, emojis [reactions] doesn’t really give you anything.”

Instead, Ojeda uses the WhatsApp business platform, where the interactions with readers are “that of a client and a business provider or service provider” — like a customer service line. It allows Documented to have private, one-on-one discussions that come in through the backend of the platform managed by reporters. Staff can keep track of previous conversations that they had with a user, who in turn knows that they are speaking directly with a journalist. He also shares his work and updates to a channel with 8,500 Documented readers.

The intentional relationship building is also fruitful for story ideas: In 2023, Xu published a guide on where Chinese New Yorkers could find mental health services. The story had just 300 page views when Xu received a message from a mother who had recently arrived from China who saw the story on WeChat — she had an adult son with developmental disabilities and wasn’t sure where she could get support. Xu was able to connect the family with a community organization, profile the mother and her son, and then publish a separate story with resources for other Chinese New Yorkers with disabilities.

“A lot of articles are focused on why [Chinese immigrants] came here, what their journey looks like, how [they] get here, but I don’t think there was enough follow up on what their lives look like after they arrive in the US,” Xu says. How immigrants find work and access services is part of the story of US immigration — and a place Documented can be especially helpful.

The attention to unorthodox apps and forums is important, but El-Katatney knows that nothing is forever when it comes to the media business; a platform that is useful one day could change overnight. The newsroom is thinking about contingency plans and how to deepen its engagement. The Caribbean readers send a lot of voice notes — should Documented produce more audio work? How can reporters protect sources, who are increasingly scared to talk to the press amid the federal attacks on immigrants? The platforms are ultimately secondary; scale is not the motivation.

“It is the community driven journalism model that really does allow us to have this incredible access to our audience, this really strong pulse that then informs all of our reporting,” El-Katatney says. “It makes our reporting compelling, it makes it effective, it allows us to reach people that we would’ve never been able to reach.”

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• Mia Sato