The Backstory: A year of impactful journalism

This edition of The Backstory takes you inside some of our most impactful work in 2025.

In our Dangerous Roads series, Newsday’s reporters explored the causes behind the alarming number of crashes on the Island and continue to work to find solutions for safer roads; the Unprotected investigation takes a deep look into the illicit world of sex trafficking, stemming from a missing Patchogue girl who was later found on a yacht; Broken Practice revealed the dozens of doctors who were allowed to keep their licenses and practice medicine after allegations of foul practice; our ICE coverage follows the impact President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has on immigrants living in local Long Island communities; our deep dive on NUMC’s years of financial mismanagement exposes the frail state of the hospital system and the impact on its patients; and our dig into the election confusion in Huntington over candidate Maria Delgado’s Working Families Party ballot in the supervisor race has led to the State Attorney General’s Office reviewing complaints.

Powerful local reporting exposes the wrongs in our society and puts pressure on those who are accountable. It strengthens our communities by giving you the information you need to make important decisions in your daily life. We will continue to build on this significant reporting in the new year.

Happy Holidays!

‘Dangerous Roads’

The toll of car crashes on Long Island is staggering. Over a decade, traffic collisions killed more than 2,100 people — roughly the size of the Village of Bellport. An additional 16,000 victims — about the size of Floral Park — suffered injuries so severe, they couldn't walk away from the crash unaided.

In March, Newsday launched the first part of a yearlong series on Long Island's Dangerous Roads, one of the most pressing issues facing the region.

With storytelling about victims and innovative data analysis, more than a dozen stories, videos and digital tools have explored aspects of vehicle crashes on Long Island. We've looked at some of the 50,000 unlicensed drivers in New York, why state laws on drugged driving perpetuate an increasing number of people refusing blood and breath tests, the Island's most dangerous intersections and the deadliest areas for pedestrians. Articles examined aggressive driving and the financial cost of crashes, why hit-and-run drivers leave the scene and the hurdles advocates face to improve infrastructure.

For the first time, we used data visualizations to explain why our roads are so poorly maintained, despite great wealth and high taxes. We compared road ratings, local government spending and traffic volume to come up with Long Island's first analysis of local road spending. And we looked at whether Long Island law enforcement issues enough tickets for safer roads; by comparing tickets issued for dangerous driving offenses with miles driven, we discovered Suffolk County's rate of ticketing is far below many other regions of the state.

Newsday built a database of fatal crashes that updates daily to identify trends in crashes and provide context in more immediate stories. The database represents the most up-to-date, publicly available count of fatal car crashes on Long Island.

NextLI helped launch an interactive crash map that readers can search and use to explore their neighborhoods. Transportation reporter Alfonso Castillo has anchored the weekly Dangerous Roads newsletter, which has developed into a steady, active conversation with readers.

Newsday also hosted two town halls for the public. The first featured Newsday journalists talking about the work we are doing to expose the issue and gave the community a chance to voice concerns. The second, moderated by Castillo, brought in experts from the state DMV, state transportation department, law enforcement and leading advocates to discuss solutions with more than 100 active participants in the audience.

The series will continue next year with stories focused on solutions, traveling to areas that have addressed the problems head on and finding what lessons can be applied to Long Island.

Soon after the series launched, Rep. Laura Gillen called for federal hearings on traffic safety, citing Newsday's reporting. Police have vowed to step up enforcement, and Suffolk police promise that 2025 will be the most active year in recent history for ticketing of dangerous driving offenses like speeding and aggressive driving.

‘Unprotected'

Newsday's "Unprotected" series has told stories of sex trafficking on Long Island through the disappearance of a 14-year-old Patchogue girl who was discovered after 25 days on the yacht of a man now charged with kidnapping, raping and trafficking her.

The series, as Newsday TV reporter Shari Einhorn explains in the latest episode of The Backstory, has dealt with a topic many people on Long Island either "don't know happens in suburbia or don't want to know."

A team of Newsday reporters, including Grant Parpan and Sandra Peddie, spent much of the year since the now-15-year-old girl's Dec. 9, 2024, disappearance examining police and court records and interviewing people involved to show how systems put in place to protect the child so far have failed. The team balanced ethical considerations to provide a detailed report into cases involving the girl in the hopes that it could protect another child from having to go through the same thing.

The scope of Newsday’s scrutiny of sex trafficking included an investigation into the connections between the illicit sex trade and Long Island’s hotel industry. An investigative story found 59 hotels or motels where law enforcement had documented cases of sex trafficking or prostitution in recent years, including cases with child victims.

Suffolk lawmakers passed a law to crack down on trafficking, which they described as “rampant,” on the heels of the “Unprotected” investigation. The new law restricts the number of hours hotel rooms can be rented, increased fines and added recordkeeping requirements for hotel operators.

Working Families Party candidates

Our curiosity was first piqued as we tried to track down biographical information on candidates running in town races across Long Island for the Newsday Voters Guide. We soon realized that reporters were having a difficult time contacting many Working Families Party candidates for that basic information. Among those candidates was Maria Delgado, in the Huntington supervisor race. Republican incumbent Supervisor Ed Smyth and challenger Cooper Macco also were on that ballot.

In that Huntington election, more than 40,000 people cast their votes. On Election Night, Nov. 4, Newsday reported that Smyth defeated Macco by a razor-thin margin of 602 votes, while Delgado gathered about 1,200 votes — enough to have possibly swung the election. That cast a spotlight on Delgado and deepened the mystery surrounding her. Who was she? Newsday reporter Deborah Morris, who covers Huntington, was assigned to find out.

With Delgado unreachable by phone, Morris tracked down Delgado’s home address and knocked on her door. An apparently stunned Delgado answered and told Morris that she had "no idea" she was on the ballot. Later, however, Morris learned that, according to the Suffolk Board of Elections, Delgado voted in-person on Nov. 4, and in a June primary as well. That triggered a broader look at how Delgado landed on those ballots. In the days that followed the November election, the State Attorney General’s Office confirmed that it was reviewing complaints in the Huntington race. What followed were accusations that the Working Families Party line was hijacked in Huntington and elsewhere.

Newsday is continuing to report on the unusual story and explain what happened in a local election that has stirred intense interest among those inside and outside of Huntington. Because at its center is a story about how people shape politics — and elections.

‘Broken Practice’

Newsday cast a watchdog’s eye on Long Island’s doctors in 2025. It found a system that was slow to discipline wayward physicians, fewer investigations by regulators and less state money available to investigate state license holders.

Illegally distributing opioids. Fabricating patient records and billing patients for unnecessary, sometimes painful tests. These are just some of the allegations 46 Long Island doctors faced while being allowed to keep their license to practice medicine in New York State, the Newsday investigation found.

The investigation also found a shift toward remediation rather than serious sanctions. The state agency that makes discipline rulings, the Office of Professional Medical Conduct, saw its budget decline over the past 10 years, while the number of physicians increased 22%.

Change came to the state’s Board of Professional Medical Conduct after the investigation was published. Dr. Thomas T. Lee stepped down as board chairman following our reporting; he was also a top lobbyist in Albany on behalf of the state’s physicians.

Scaffold Law and doctors exposed

Newsday began investigating the Scaffold Law, an only-in-New-York, 140-year-old measure that holds property owners and contractors responsible for all construction site falls — even in instances of worker negligence — in March amid reports that the legislation had caused construction and insurance costs to skyrocket.

The resulting series of stories found that manipulation of the Scaffold Law had prompted a wave of allegedly phony accidents and frivolous lawsuits perpetrated by an interconnected network of law firms and medical professionals, including many based on Long Island.

As a result of our stories, the New York State Workers Compensation Board has revoked the authority of multiple local doctors to treat injured workers; the medical license of other surgeons is now under review, and bills to reform the Scaffold Law were introduced both in Albany’s State Legislature and by Republicans in the House of Representatives.

ICE

With President Donald Trump making mass deportation arrests of those accused of remaining in the country illegally a hallmark of his second term in office, Nassau County aligned itself with that mission by working closer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

As reported by Newsday, the policy has resulted in Islandwide arrests and a partnership with ICE to house immigrants in the county jail that’s led to at least one reported death. Data-driven stories by Newsday’s politics team revealed that some 1,400 people were held in the jail between January and July, resulting in state lawmakers making a surprise visit to the East Meadow facility. In late November, Newsday found more than five dozen people, some accused of low-level offenses, were transferred to ICE.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a staunch Trump ally, has stood by the policy, arguing it’s made the county safer. Advocates have told Newsday that the policy has violated constitutional rights, regardless of status.

NUMC

Amid major changes at Nassau Health Care Corp., the entity overseeing Nassau University Medical Center, Newsday found some embattled hospital executives had dined lavishly at a Manhattan eatery, racking up a four-figure tab even as the public safety-net hospital serving the county’s poorest population operated in the red.

Newsday’s story was published months after the state took over NUMC following years of financial mismanagement and political patronage. The result was the ultimate ousting of its CEO, Megan Ryan, and a complete overhaul of the board. Since Newsday’s reporting, officials have announced steps in turning the hospital around, which include the hiring of veteran hospital administrator Thomas Stokes, who is expected to succeed Ryan as its permanent CEO next month.

Newsday’s investigations team also dug into NUMC’s troubled finances and found the hospital hasn’t made a profit in 24 of the last 25 years and was over $1 billion in debt. Newsday also found that 85% of patients discharged in 2024 from NUMC paid for care with government insurance, like Medicare and Medicaid, which provides lower reimbursements for care than private insurance companies, contributing to the institution’s financial shortfalls.