This is What Transformational Thinking Looks Like
I keep talking about the need for transformational thinking and action in media. Let’s look at an example of how that actually works.
Welcome to Dispatch #79 of The Audio Insurgent.
Those who work with me often tease me about my Ted Lasso-like optimistic view of many (okay, most) things. That’s mostly a fair observation, but I’ve come by that optimism the hard way, through a lot of personal and professional challenges and setbacks that I had to fight my way through.
This has been a rough week for many people I care about. Those in U.S. public media have been talking about this moment for more than 30 years. Back when Newt Gingrich's Contract with America legislative agenda floated the idea of ending federal support for public media, the public–and legislators–balked at the notion. The proposal died, but afterwards, just with the simple suggestion of a threat, public radio’s public financial support and listening surged and exploded. And with it, public radio grew significantly in the years that followed. (Thanks, Newt.)
Yet even then, those in public media knew this day would eventually come.
And here it is.
I’ve struggled to figure out what I should say at this moment, so I’ve largely stayed quiet on this over the last few months.
But now, the industry is struggling to figure out what to do. And I think that’s where I’m hopefully most useful.
Rather than tell people what to do, I want to share how I believe you should frame your thinking about the future.
And podcasters, given the state of the podcasting industry, you should think like this too.
I’ve long stated that public media needs to embrace transformational change in order to find its future, both as a collective entity and individual organizations in communities across the country.
And the calculus is pretty simple: those who think transformationally will have a future; those who don’t, won’t.
Instead of just beating the drum of transformational thinking and change, I thought I’d share an example of it that I love. So this post is about a non-profit newsroom in New York City called Documented NY. It’s an inspiring story. It’s easy to understand. And best of all, what they did is immediately replicable by any public service organization, anywhere.
Here goes…
[TODAY’S THING: THIS IS WHAT TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKING LOOKS LIKE] The story of Documented NY begins with a simple, yet profound question:
What would happen if we stopped reporting ABOUT immigrants and started reporting FOR immigrants?
Documented’s story isn’t about audio. It’s not even, really, about media in the traditional sense. But it’s one of the clearest examples I’ve encountered of someone who encountered existential obstacles, stopped, rethought everything, and then built a new structure from the ground up–and can prove it worked.
Documented NY was started by two journalists, Max Siegelbaum and Mazin Sidahmed. Mazin and Max were both experienced immigration reporters. Both had covered migration for major publications for years—Mazin from Beirut and Max from Cairo, back when the Arab Spring was unraveling into a migration crisis. After relocating to the U.S. for graduate school, they turned their attention to American immigration, each from different angles: Max digging into detention centers and courts, Mazin focusing on the intersection of immigration and national security.
But something felt off.
“The people that we were engaging with on a day-to-day basis never actually engaged with the journalism we produced about them,” Mazin told me, noting that many of the people he was reporting on couldn’t even speak the language of the journalism he created based on their experiences. “That disconnect often felt extractive.”
It’s a familiar issue to anyone who’s ever produced media “about” a group, but not “for” or “with” them. Even though their work was frequently cited, shared, and celebrated—there was a growing unease. Mazin and Max wanted to do more than drop into communities, gather stories, and leave.
Then came 2017 and the first Trump administration. The national press was focused on the border and Capitol Hill. But in cities like New York, where immigrants were feeling the ripple effects of federal policy in daily, local ways, coverage was sparse.
So they started Documented—not to replace national coverage, but to fill the vacuum in local reporting about how immigration policy was reshaping life in New York. They launched with the best intentions and the best practices of nonprofit journalism: accountability reporting, policy investigations, and impact tracking.
By some traditional metrics, it worked. Their work sparked legislation, prompted pension divestments from detention centers, and earned praise from peers. But there was still that disquiet.
“We were doing well in the kind of traditional nonprofit impact sense,” Mazin said, “but we weren’t doing well with the mission we had set out for ourselves.”
In short: few in the communities they covered were actually reading their work.
The goal wasn’t just to inform policy makers or drive elite media conversations. It was to serve immigrant communities directly. And that part wasn’t working. They tried translating Spanish-language versions of their stories meant for the very audiences they aimed to serve and posted them on their web site. But they still weren’t being read.
Mazin could have stopped there. He could have said, “We tried.” But instead, they transformed.
Worth noting: they didn’t set out to transform anything. They were just looking for a better way into the community. They started exploring “information needs assessment,” championed by groups like Listening Post Collective and Outlier Media.
It is really important to pause here for a moment to note that Documented wasn’t using information needs assessments to tell them what to do—they already knew what they wanted to do. They just needed help figuring out the most effective and impactful way to do it. I bring this up because too many in media use these assessments tools to identify “unmet needs” and then plan to rush into trying (and invariably failing) to address those. They forget about the passion part. No one succeeds at solving problems for audiences (or customers) without having a passion for solving that problem.
Sorry, back to Documented’s story…
The idea is simple: Documented would go to the specific immigrant communities they wanted to serve and ask, What do you actually need from a news organization? What kind of information would make your life better? What do you read, watch, and trust today?
Documented went out to weekend gatherings, markets, and other events and just talked to people about what they looked for in news.
What they heard was humbling.
“Number one, they felt that whenever they were in the news, they were either considered a victim or a criminal,” Mazin said.
Yet the real disconnect with the immigrant audiences they wished to serve was editorial. In short, people weren’t reading and engaging with their work because Documented wasn’t reporting on the things that were important to the community. Most immigration reporting was about policy, border activity, and a number of other high-level issues, and frankly, it all felt very removed and remote from the immigrants’ lives.
“The kind of news that they wanted to read was actionable information that could help them navigate New York City,” Mazin said. When Documented asked about the issues the community was most interested in, the number one issue wasn’t immigration policy or borders. The number one issue was…wage theft.
It wasn’t a top policy story. It wasn’t trending on Twitter. But it was an urgent, daily injustice experienced by countless workers. So Documented sued the Department of Labor to release records of employers convicted of wage theft in New York. Documented released a database of those convicted employers as a resource for workers, advocates, and legislators.
Other top areas for the immigrant community were other service-oriented concerns: reporting on how to get a drivers license, how to get child care, or health care.
They also reexamined what ‘community’ meant. The people they spoke to weren’t interested in international news, or border news–not even New York City news.
“To them, they wanted to know what was happening in their immigrant community in Flatbush,” Mazin said.
And the third thing, and arguably the most deeply transformational thing they learned, was platform. Instead of just posting on a web site that they couldn’t convince people to visit, they went to the places where the audience went for other information. According to Mazin, “They were mainly getting their news and information through informal WhatsApp chats.”
So Documented launched a WhatsApp newsletter—a weekly roundup of practical news and resources in Spanish. They also launched a similar Mandarin newsletter on WeChat and a Haitian Creole newsletter for the Caribbean community on NextDoor.
And that’s when things exploded.
That barely-read feed quickly became a two-way conversation. Instead of a trickle of page views–they kept seeing more and more people sign up, read, and participate. (After first meeting Mazin, I was so inspired I subscribed to the WhatsApp channel in order to see for myself–but I don’t actually speak Spanish, so, best intentions…)
But then something magical happened. People didn’t just read the newsletter…people started to ask questions back to the journalists, shared tips with each other, converse with each other, and sent voice memos. Each newsletter wasn’t just "consumed," it became the beginning of a robust, on-going conversation with the audience. And the lines between audience, sources, journalists, and community leaders became quite porous. Now, Documented reporters are required to spend 40% of their time in the channels conversing with the community, answering questions, connecting them to resources, and looking for new story ideas.
It was all a massive and incredibly successful pivot. And all came from letting go of generations of standards of reporting on immigrants and immigration, and instead just simply asking the people how they could help.
“It’s very humbling,” Mazin says. “As a journalist you are used to using your gut to decide what is an interesting story.” But instead of deciding what stories the community should care about, Documented let the community tell them what it should cover.
Mazin told me that when other journalists reach out to him now, they often skip over the hard part. They want the how-to on building a WhatsApp newsletter—but not the self-inquiry that preceded it. They want the endgame’s playbook, not the mindset shift.
But transformation isn’t a tactic. It’s a posture.
It requires humility. It requires questioning the assumptions you’ve built your work on—especially the sacred ones, like: What is news? Who is this for? Who do I think I’m helping?
As Mazin put it: “If we want to serve a different audience than the typical people who consume news—who are fluent, highly educated, often white—then we have to start thinking differently about what we consider to be news, and what we consider to be important.”
That’s not just a lesson for journalists. That’s a lesson for anyone in audio, or public media, or any creative field that has built institutions and systems around old assumptions. For public media, those assumptions may be close to 60 years old. But for podcasting, even assumptions based on the past two or three years may prove dangerously outdated.
If we want to reach new people, if we want to thrive in a new media environment, we have to stop thinking the same old ways.
At this moment, a lot of people in audio (not just public media) are having private conversations about survival. Budget and funding cuts. Audience losses. Business model changes. The rise of video. Handwringing followed by nervously asking “What’s next?”
But here’s the thing: survival is not the same as transformation. Survival is hunkering down and hoping the storm passes. Transformation is building something new that acknowledges why the old thing broke in the first place.
And, as Dick Trofel points out in his recent newsletter, please don’t make the mistake that many legacy newspapers did, by “trying to preserve as much of what has gone before as possible, rather than seizing the moment to reinvent a system, and many of its components.”
That past is now officially over. It is time to seek out the new.
This is what transformational thinking looks like.
Oh, and by the way, Mazin is looking for a partner to help Documented in podcasting. I told him I know a few people. 😉 If you’d be interested, you should write him.
In the spirit of disclosure, Documented NY received some early funding from Emerson Collective, one of Magnificent Noise’s clients. That’s how I first met Mazin. There are no financial ties or inducements for me to write about them. In fact, Emerson Collective doesn’t even know this is happening. But since we both have received funding from Emerson Collective, I felt it important to mention.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric