Maria Michela D'Alessandro | Lead Stories

Maria Michela D'Alessandro is a fact-checker for Lead Stories and a bilingual journalist for Euronews, she's now resident at the Rome bureau office.

She was born and raised in Rome but studied and worked as a freelancer in Russia, the United States, Germany, Finland, Italy. Her printed and on-air works have been published in The Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, Euronews, The Globe Post, CGTN Europe, La7, Il Caffè Weekly, Il Corriere della Sera. She gained a double master's degree in international journalism from Free University Berlin and Saint Petersburg State University.

She covers foreign issues and policy, defense, human rights, disinformation and sports.

She was embedded with the Italian Armed Forces and she covered, among others, the last World Cups.

Maria Michela speaks English and Russian, and she runs marathons.

At Lead Stories she looks for fake stories online to debunk: her work is to support the editors providing them the useful material to write a debunking. She believes that the more news you know the better you spot the fake ones, that's why when she is not working she always listens to podcasts and live news reports.

When she moved from Moscow to Washington DC, via Berlin and St. Petersburg, she understood that the eternal rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union would have captured her forever. And it did. Her MA thesis with honour, "Russia Beyond the Italian Headlines: Political Polarization in News Coverage of Russia in the Italian Media," studies and understands Russia through the major Italian newspapers - it was published in 2018.