Documented was founded by reporters Mazin Sidahmed and Max Siegelbaum in 2018 after they happened to both be assigned to New York City the previous year.

As of January 2025, Documented employs seventeen full-time staff and other freelance journalists, working in a newsroom shared with The City, and publishes content in four languages: English, Spanish, Chinese and Haitian Creole.

[2] Sidahmed stated the organization focuses on "basic, everyday economic and political issues" affecting working-class immigrants as opposed to "flashy, investigative stories, or high-minded pieces".

[3] For instance, it has published information on applying for prepaid debits cards given by the city to asylum seekers and an explanation of minimum wage policies for delivery app workers.

[3] Documented partnered with ProPublica to create "Wage Theft Monitor", an online tool tracking businesses that have committed wage theft against immigrant staff based on more than twenty years of data from the New York State Department of Labor that they filed a lawsuit to obtain.