The 37th Graham Hovey Lecture with Mazin Sidahmed

The University of Michigan Wallace House Center for Journalists hosted the 37th Graham Hovey Lecture on Tuesday with featured speaker Mazin Sidahmed, the co-founder of Documented. Documented is a nonprofit news organization founded in New York City and dedicated to reporting with and on local immigrant communities. During the event, Sidahmed sorted out immigration facts from fiction and discussed the importance of reporting locally.

Wallace House Director Lynette Clemetson kicked off the lecture series by explaining that the event aimed to highlight the importance of local journalism while bringing the community together.

“The expectation of this event is always to have a mix of people from across campus and the community, and to have them leave thinking deeply about some aspect of journalism that they hadn’t previously thought about,” Clemetson said. 

Clemetson then introduced Sidahmed. Sidahmed completed his Knight Wallace fellowship at the University and told the crowd that by the end of it, he had a different mindset. 

“I ended my fellowship at the University with a renewed faith in journalism and a lot of energy to dedicate towards leading and moving,” Sidahmed said.

Sidahmed in the United Kingdom after seeking asylum there; this experience, he said, is what attracted to stories of migration. Sidahmed told the crowd that, along with co-founder Max Siegelbaum, Documented emerged to serve immigrants and change the way immigration is covered in newsrooms.

“We also felt that there was a structural issue in the way we covered immigration as journalists,” Sidahmed said. “The problem is twofold. First, journalists often treat immigrants as subjects to be written about, rather than an audience to be written for. Second, much of the coverage focuses on policy debates and political controversies, overlooking the day to day realities and practical information needs of liberal communities.”

Documented is published in many languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole and English, making local news accessible for all types of communities. Documented publishes articles through their website, but also through nontraditional ways like WhatsApp News Service, ensuring that the information is distributed to all communities.

“We found that writing for immigrant communities, rather than just about them, not only serves these communities better, it is also key to improving our broader public discourse on immigration” Sidahmed said.

LSA senior June Harkrider said she believes the lessons about writing for local communities were her biggest takeaways from the lecture in an interview with The Michigan Daily.

“It’s about the importance of writing for communities, fostering local journalism and also helping to shape and change the narratives around immigration,” Harkrider said. “I’m from New York, and I didn’t even realize the extent of the immigration housing crisis that is happening there right now, so this was really eye opening.”

As Documented continues to cover and publish news about immigrants, tailored towards immigrants, Sidahmed looks forward to expanding the organization.

“I can tell you that I believe in my whole heart that what we’ve built at Documented is the future of local news, a future where people have access to information about things that actually impact their daily lives in a language that suits them best,” Sidahmed said.

Daily Staff Reporter Halle Pratt can be reached at hallehap@umich.edu.

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