Meet the nextLI team
Rita Ciolli nextLI Director/EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR Rita F. Ciolli’s career at Newsday spans four decades. She is currently Editor of the Editorial and Opinion pages for Newsday and amNewYork after starting her career at Newsday as a summer intern in 1972. Ciolli’s assignments include almost a decade at Newsday’s Washington bureau assigned to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Department and FBI. After a long stint as a media and technology reporter, she covered the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. She joined the Editorial Board in 2005, and two years later took over as its head. Under her leadership, the board has expanded its digital and print offerings in addition to winning numerous awards. In 2013, Newsday’s editorials about the help Long Island needed after Superstorm Sandy’s devastation were recognized as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. @ritaciolli | rita.ciolli@newsday.com Amanda Fiscina nextLI Project Manager/EDITOR OF PLATFORMS AND STRATEGY Amanda Fiscina works to use digital tools like video, podcasts, newsletters and interactives to connect with readers and amplify the editorial board’s message online. She attended Fordham University, where she interned at CBS, Crain’s and the New York Post and Columbia’s University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She worked as a local reporter for Patch.com and homepage editor at the Aol/Huffington Post Media Group before starting at Newsday 2014. @adfiscina | email Coralie Saint-Louis OUTREACH AND ENGAGEMENT MANAGER Coralie Saint-Louis is working to build nextLI’s community across Long Island by leading the public dialogue about the region’s future. In the past, Coralie served as the Managing Editor of the Haitian Times where she covered immigration. At the US Agency for Global MediaCoralie was an Editor and Digital Media Manager for Africa Rizing. There, she covered the West African region and African diaspora communities in the US. She also managed a team of reporters in West Africa while leading several social media campaigns around the missing Nigerian Chibok Girls and Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). Coralie’s journalism career started at the Voice of America, where she interned for the Creole Service during her undergraduate studies. @coralienewsday | email Kai Teoh DATA JOURNALIST Kai Teoh is the data journalist for NextLI, and does the data crunching and writing for the project. A Malaysian expat, he’s worked in Minnesota as a photographer and columnist, the lower Hudson region as a newsroom web developer and the Pacific Northwest as a data journalist and product developer before finding himself back on the east coast at Newsday. A strong believer that a “Miata Is Always The Answer” and has driven coast-to-coast twice now – you can probably find Kai looking for dive bars on Long Island as he familiarizes himself with his new home. Michael Cusanelli DIGITAL PRODUCTION MANAGER Michael Cusanelli is the digital manager for Newsday Opinion, and handles the daily digital presence of the Opinion section, which includes running our social media accounts and coordinating The Point newsletter. A Long Island native, he completed three consecutive summer internships with Newsday’s web department from 2011-2013 while studying journalism at Stony Brook University before taking a job as a blogger for an enterprise technology trade site, where he had the opportunity to travel internationally. He returned to Newsday in 2016 as an associate editor for the web department, where he helped cover breaking news and report on hometown issues like poverty and Long Island millennials before being lured to the Opinions department. In his spare time, he can be found catching up on the latest superhero movies at the theater and debating the lasting importance of Star Wars. @mcusanellisb | email
