Matthew Reagan ‘21, Documenters Assignment Editor of the LA Documenters and journalist at the LA Local, brought Documenters to Occidental College March 2025. The organization works to keep the public informed about local politics across the nation by assigning and paying reporters to cover public meetings and publishing the notes on the official Documenters website.
Documenters helps further connect Occidental with the surrounding Northeast LA (NELA) neighborhoods, Reagan said.
“It’s a dual mission of providing opportunities for students while also providing a community service to the residents of Northeast LA,” Reagan said. “[It says] ‘Hey, we’re here at Oxy. We’re not just here to learn, but to really be neighbors with y’all in East LA.’”
According to the Docs@Oxy application, student documenters have the opportunity to develop their notes into stand-alone news stories for publication in The Occidental and the LA Local after attending meetings, but do not need to be staff writers for The Occidental.
According to Reagan, his main role within the organization is to see which meetings should have a documenter and ensure the documenters who attend them are supported throughout the note-taking process.
“I’m working with [students] to fact check, edit and then eventually publish their notes on the site so regular residents or advocates or our journalists at the LA Local, can know what happened if they weren’t able to attend themselves,” Reagan said.
According to Reagan, he brought Documenters to Occidental to give students similar experiences to ones which helped launch his own career in journalism after his time as The Occidental’s Editor-in-Chief.
“My start in professional journalism really happened covering a neighborhood council meeting,” Reagan said. “I really got a great opportunity through a local paper to get my feet wet and cover neighborhood councils.”
Claire Wilson-Black* (senior) attended an Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council (ERNC) meeting March 3 at the Eagle Rock City Hall as a documenter. At the meeting, Wilson-Black took notes on the meeting, which she later uploaded to the Documenters website.
Wilson-Black said she already had an interest in government and got involved with Documenters after receiving an email from James Miller** (senior), explaining the Documenters program.
“I was thinking about the ways I wanted to spend my time in my last semester and I saw [the] email from [Miller],” Wilson-Black said. “It sounded right up my alley because I am super interested in local government and haven’t gotten to do anything quite this local before.”
Documenter Samhita Krishnan* (first year) said she got involved with Documenters because she thinks people need to pay more attention to local politics.
“I feel like [local politics] need to be taken with the same consideration that national politics are, because a lot of the small decisions that are made here at these council meetings impact our country and even our state,” Krishnan said.
According to Wilson-Black, Documenters provides a record of notes taken at local government meetings to help keep the general public informed of what community members can enact change on.
“Ultimately, it’s not just about exactly what is happening, like each motion or who seconds the motion or whatever,” Wilson-Black said. “It’s also ‘What’s the story there, who’s showing up, who’s not showing up, what are people interested in, what are the issues community members care about?’”
Wilson-Black said the process of selecting what aspects of meetings she includes in her notes was a learning curve.
“Sometimes meetings can be tense or sometimes they can be super easy and super quick,” Wilson-Black said. “[It’s] learning how to tell a story in your notes.”
Reagan said although the Boulevard Sentinel, where he began covering local politics, has shut down, he wants to continue to support Occidental students.
“I want to make sure that students at Oxy who are interested in journalism or research or writing have those similar opportunities that really helped me launch my journalism career,” Reagan said.
Contact Mars Gallati at gallati@oxy.edu
*Claire Wilson-Black and Samhita Krishnan are staff writers for The Occidental
**James Miller is a Senior Editor and former Editor-In-Chief for The Occidental
