Five Media Organizations That Spotlight Underreported News

These digital news platforms led by Columbia Journalism School alumni are tackling human-rights issues and serving readers in practical ways.

February 12, 2022

Prison Journalism Project

Publishing articles by incarcerated reporters

“Over two million people in the US are behind bars — that’s as many people as live in Botswana,” says Shaheen Pasha ’00JRN, a longtime journalist who covers mass incarceration and the US justice system. “Imagine the population of an entire country with a very limited voice in the media and no real way to communicate with the outside world.” Pasha is on a mission to provide that voice through Prison Journalism Project (PJP), a nonprofit that trains incarcerated people to be journalists, then publishes their articles, essays, and poems online.

“We’re trying to create the first nationwide network of prison journalists and give them the tools to be part of the conversation around criminal-justice reform,” explains Pasha, who cofounded the organization in 2020 and serves as its co–executive director.

To date, PJP has published close to two thousand articles by incarcerated reporters at nearly two hundred correctional institutions across the United States. The stories include both hard news, such as reports on COVID rates and violence among inmates, and moving personal essays, such as reflections on the sorrow of spending holidays behind bars. Articles are submitted by mail or through closed e-mail systems, transcribed by volunteers, edited by PJP staff, and published on the organization’s website. Thanks to donations, the nonprofit recently started paying all writers between $25 and $75 per story. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but $50 pays for a month’s worth of items at the commissary, and it’s a huge, huge deal to be paid for an article as a professional writer,” Pasha says.

In addition to publishing stories, the organization offers training called PJP J-School that teaches students how to write articles. Participants are given lessons in recording personal observations, interviewing, collecting data, reporting news, and other key components of journalism. Because of the pandemic, most instruction has taken place through mailed course materials or over Zoom, although some classes are led by incarcerated instructors inside prisons. Whether or not PJP’s students use their training to become journalists, Pasha believes the lessons they learn are useful and relevant. “They can take the communication, interview, research, writing, and social skills and go into other careers,” she says.

Shaheen Pasha

Corey Minatani, who wrote for PJP while serving time in Washington State, says working with the organization gave him not only valuable skills but newfound confidence. “Before, I wasn’t sure I had much to offer in the field of journalism,” he says. “Once I published my first article, about my facility’s humane treatment of inmates during COVID-19, many inmates and several corrections staff thanked me for writing the piece.” He introduced PJP to several of his fellow prisoners and encouraged them to contribute. “I can’t describe the joy and sense of hope when a mentee of mine convinces himself to write and submit,” says Minatani, who since his release has volunteered with PJP while completing a doctorate in theology.

Before founding PJP, Pasha, a Brooklyn native, spent more than a decade reporting in the US and Middle East; in 2006, she led CNN Money’s coverage of the Enron trial. “I was covering law and courts, but I never really thought much about what happens to people after cases end,” says Pasha. She started to take an interest in prison journalism after a close friend received a life sentence. “The first time I went to visit him, I was talking to him — this person I’d grown up with and hung out with since I was a teenager — through a dirty plexiglass window, and he said to me, ‘Shaheen, everybody has a story in here; you’ll just never hear any of them.’”

His words resonated, and years later, when Pasha joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she began volunteering at the nearby Hampshire County Jail, teaching inmates writing and reporting. “That was when I realized that this should be a national initiative,” she says. Today, in addition to running PJP, Pasha is an assistant professor of journalism at Penn State University and teaches at the nearby Centre County Correctional Facility. She leads Penn State’s chapter of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which brings undergraduates inside a local correctional facility to learn journalism alongside incarcerated students.

Pasha ultimately hopes that the unique perspectives of PJP participants will enrich mainstream reporting and influence public policy on criminal justice. “We want to provide the opportunity for people who have actually lived through these experiences to have room at the table and be a part of the conversation,” she says. “Right now, a lot of people who have never stepped foot inside a prison are making very big decisions about what happens in prisons.”

Documented

Capturing the lives of immigrants in New York City

Late last year, numerous beneficiaries of the Excluded Workers Fund, a New York State relief program designed to help undocumented workers during the pandemic, realized that money was disappearing from their bank accounts. One woman noticed that over $6,000 had been spent at high-end online retailers, and after reporting the fraudulent charges, she sent a tip to Documented, a nonprofit digital-news site dedicated to immigrant issues in New York City.

The staff started investigating, and soon other victims came forward. “We found that a network of scammers had installed cameras and card-reading devices on ATMs around the city,” says Max Siegelbaum ’16JRN, Documented’s cofounder and co–executive director. “We were able to break the story because of the level of communication and trust we had built with our audience,” he adds.

An investigative journalist and New York City native, Siegelbaum founded Documented in 2018 with his former Columbia Journalism School peer Mazin Sidahmed ’16JRN. He says they came up with the idea largely in response to the election of Donald Trump, who at the time was shaping his presidency around tightened border security and a crackdown on illegal immigration. “There were huge changes happening in US cities that, because of the decline in local news, few outlets were really covering,” explains Sidahmed, himself an immigrant from Sudan who grew up in the United Kingdom. “We decided to do something to provide sustained, local coverage around immigration.”

Max Siegelbaum and Mazin Sidahmed (Felipe De La Hoz)

Sidahmed and Siegelbaum, both of whom had extensive experience reporting on immigration and human rights for traditional newspapers, began investigating everything from immigrant detentions to predatory bail bonds and published some of the resulting articles in Spanish as well as English. “We wanted to make sure that the people at the center of the stories were also reading the stories,” says Sidahmed.

After its launch, the nonprofit undertook an extensive study of the news-consumption habits of New York’s immigrants. “We learned that undocumented Spanish speakers wanted a news site that provided access to resources and that portrayed them with more agency, not just as victims and criminals. We also found that most got their news through informal networks,” says Sidahmed. Since 2019, Documented has distributed a Spanish-language newsletter called Documented Semanal through the messaging platform WhatsApp. It invites readers to send tips and ask questions of immigration lawyers or other experts.

As crime, poverty, and other hardships continue to affect many immigrants and refugees in the New York area, Sidahmed and Siegelbaum are in the process of expanding coverage of the Chinese, Caribbean, and other ethnic communities. They are looking closely at issues surrounding labor and housing, as well as the effects of climate change on immigrant neighborhoods. “Last year we had this horrible storm where people drowned in their basement apartments,” says Siegelbaum. “I don’t think the city has really come to terms with that.”

Sidahmed and Siegelbaum credit the tools of digital journalism with Documented’s ability to reach and expand a niche audience. “It’s lowered the barrier to entry, since we don’t deal with printing fees and distribution,” says Siegelbaum. “We’re also able to experiment with different forms of storytelling and harness the ways people communicate, whether through smartphones, WhatsApp, audio, visuals, or Twitter.” Plus, as a nonprofit, Documented is able to help fill a void left by a decline in local reporting. “The degradation of local news impacts our democracy and affects public services,” says Sidahmed. “It’s been really exciting to not just create local news but reimagine what it can be.”