Anastasia Valeeva

I started working at Newsday in December 2022, jumping into the former U.S. Rep. George Santos coverage. It’s my first workplace in the U.S., but I bring years of experience of in-depth reporting and data storytelling from national media outlets in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. I also did a fellowship at The Marshall Project, a national U.S. media organization focused on criminal justice reform, before landing at Newsday.

Born and raised in Russia, I wanted to be a journalist since childhood when I interviewed all the people in my family. In high school, I started a school newspaper and reported for a local radio station. Having graduated from journalism school, I started working as a TV producer at a national broadcasting company. That’s where I produced reports about political protests, North Korea and people who lost their loved ones in terrorist attacks.

I want to look where nobody else has looked before and ask the questions nobody ever asked.

Unable to continue my career amidst growing censorship in Russia, I went to study abroad, and this is when I discovered data journalism. This changed my life. I fell in love with data immediately. I saw how it can help us tell stories, impossible to find otherwise.

Data journalists analyze and scrutinize government statistics and other data for the public interest and publish it in a digestible format for everyone to use.

I want to use my data skills to find and cover the trends and patterns happening here on Long Island. Data can help us tell representative stories – in other words, everyone would be able to see themselves in it. With data we can even build a tool, like a searchable database, so that Long Islanders can look up what happens in their specific town or school district, and make a data-informed decision about their vote or how to spend their money.

Newsday has a unique role as “the Long Island newspaper”, serving the communities of Nassau and Suffolk. So, Newsday, like no one else, is positioned to be getting the data on all the various aspects of life —from health care and education to politics and business—across Long Island. We analyze this information and publish stories that provide the necessary context for our readers.

Our subscribers also gain access to interactive tools, particularly maps and databases, which help them look closer at their communities. Will my school district get more or less money in state aid than last year? Is my town going to be affected by the flood? How does my vote affect the election outcome?

As an investigative data reporter, I want to look where nobody else has looked before and ask the questions nobody ever asked. And I will be able to answer them with data.