Ethar El-Katatney’s Mission

Ethar El-Katatney is the editor-in-chief of Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City.

Elliot Waldman and Rafe H Andrews recently sat down with Ethar to discuss Documented’s community-driven approach to covering immigration and her career journey from Cairo to New York City.

To start, tell us about Documented and its mission.

Documented was launched in 2018 by two friends who went to university together, Mazin Sidahmed and Max Siegelbaum. They traveled abroad and worked with different immigrant communities.

One of the stories Mazin likes to tell is that he was in Beirut talking to Syrian refugees, for The Daily Star in Lebanon, but when he started to write up the piece he realized, “The people I’m writing about will never read this story. It’s not in a language they can understand and it’s for a completely different audience.”

Borne out of experiences like that was the realization of the need for immigrant audiences to have their own newsroom: To have content written not just in their languages but also centering their voices, delivered on the platforms they use.

The premise is that it’s a community-driven journalism model, where the stories are not just about them, but come from them and incorporate their voices.

We cover the policy issues that affect immigrant lives through news stories and investigations and also resource guides and community events.

What that means in practice is that we have four linguistic verticals: English, Chinese, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. We are on all the usual social platforms, but we’re also specifically on WhatsApp for the Spanish community, WeChat for the Chinese community, and NextDoor for the Caribbean community.

There are 3 million immigrants in New York City, half a million of whom are undocumented, and two-thirds of New Yorkers have an immigrant family member.

Our north star is to cover the policy issues that affect immigrant lives, and we do that not only through traditional news stories and investigations but also through resource guides and community engagement.

That last component can be very multi-faceted: It’s everything from answering private messages from our audience to being at a community event with a booth.

Can you provide an example where there was input from your audience that had an impact on your coverage?

There was a recent case where someone reached out and told us, “I heard ICE can come arrest me at my court hearing so I’m not going to my court hearing.” We responded to that in a few ways.

First, we responded directly and said, “You have to go to your court hearing. If you don’t, there could be serious consequences.” Then we asked him where he saw this misinformation, so that we could effectively fact-check it for them.

We also published a guide that talks about whether ICE can actually apprehend people at their court hearings–with the caveat that these are unprecedented times.

And finally, we did a piece on misinformation around this issue and how it’s spreading. In the course of that work, we heard from readers who told us they actually had their court appointment via Zoom. And that’s how we realized that there are actually fraudsters who are preying on people’s fears of showing up to court by creating fake Zoom courts with fake judges and everything.

Realizing that this is a widespread issue, we created an online, multilingual webinar with a trusted community partner to inform migrants about how to spot immigration-related fraud.

At least half of our coverage comes from our audience, if not more.

So that’s one example, but we’re constantly generating new ideas for stories with input from our audience.

We’ve done stories about what it’s like to live in shelters for newly arrived immigrants, including basic things like what the food is like in those facilities. We also do stories about how to find housing, how to get a work permit, how to get a driver’s license, things like that.

Overall, I would say at least half of our coverage comes from our audience, if not more.

How has your coverage changed following Donald Trump’s return to power in January?

I joined the week before the election, and through our reporting in immigrant communities we already had a pretty clear sense that he was favored to win, given the strong support he had from immigrants here in New York.

And sure enough, since he won we’ve seen a big bump in traffic and engagement–everyone wants to learn more about immigration-related topics, so they’re doing searches online and finding our articles.

I always remind our team that a lot of that increased readership is tertiary. It’s great that more people are reading us, but it’s important that we stay true to our mission of serving our core audience, which is immigrant communities primarily, and secondarily the immigration policy community.

It’s a crucial moment in history and we have a big responsibility to our communities.

Along with the increased focus on immigration has come an increased interest in our coverage. Other newsrooms have reached out about republishing our content and we’re creating more partnerships.

We’re also offering guidance to outlets that have reached out to learn about what kind of language to use, how best to protect sources, and the ethics of covering immigration raids and the need to balance that breaking news coverage with concerns about contributing to an atmosphere of fear. It’s a crucial moment in history and we have a big responsibility to our communities.

Ultimately we’re a small newsroom–I have five reporters, we’re not going to be able to cover everything, so we do have to be selective about how we allocate resources.

For example, we decided that the recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, was a story that we had to cover, because he has a Green Card and whether the administration succeeded in deporting him mattered to our readers.

But that didn’t mean we were going to start covering the broader protest movement because that would stray from our core focus.

You mentioned primarily serving immigrant communities while also having this secondary focus on people who work in the immigration policy space. How do you balance those two objectives? Do you ever find they’re at cross purposes with each other?

We have one product that’s very clearly for our immigration policy audience–it’s a newsletter called Early Arrival, which is a wrap-up of national immigration news from New York, DC, and beyond.

We also have a wage theft monitor where you can pull up any business in New York that’s been found guilty of wage theft and see how much they owe in unpaid wages, and that is a tool that’s been utilized in the policy community.

I wouldn’t say there’s been conflict between that work and the work of serving our core immigrant audiences, but we are resource-constrained. That means focusing more on verticals that serve the policy community will come at the cost of our other efforts. So, it’s a balancing act.

I’ve always had a driving focus on amplifying stories that weren’t being told.

The important thing is that when we’re working on a story, I always try to have a clear answer to the questions, “Who is this for? Who does this serve?” And even after a story is published, we’re very focused on impact. We have all sorts of metrics that we use to track what kind of impact a story had.

Can you talk a bit more about your background and how you got here?

I’m Egyptian and worked out of Egypt for the first seven or eight years of my career. I covered everything from health care to education to social justice issues, and then the Arab Spring and the revolutions that occurred in the region.

But throughout my career I’ve always had a driving focus on amplifying stories that weren’t being told. I moved to the US with Al-Jazeera for the first couple years and covered school shootings, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the first Trump administration. Then I spent a few years with The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

Along the way I realized how rapidly America was changing and I spent a lot of time reflecting on whether journalism is really doing the work that I started out with two decades ago.

Are we really telling the stories that need to be told? If we are, are people listening? Are we informing people so that they can take advantage of this democratic system instead of taking it for granted?

I really wanted a very measurable and clear focus on the communities I serve, and to feel a connection with them.

So when the role opened up at Documented, it felt like a very natural fit. I’m an immigrant myself, and even for me, someone who speaks fluent English, has two graduate degrees, and was for all intents and purposes highly qualified for jobs, it was very hard to navigate all the ins and outs of living and working here, and the legal path to immigration was long, tough, expensive and taxing on all fronts.

So I feel a very personal connection and passion about the work we do.