Meet the New Press

Vadim Lavrusik was born in Ivatsevichi, Belarus, in 1986. When he was eight, after his parents divorced, Lavrusik came to America with his mother, grandmother, two older brothers, and an older sister. They landed briefly in Chicago before coming to Minnesota, where Lavrusik attended Eden Prairie High School. Lavrusik says he was determined to be a writer—a poet or maybe a novelist—by the time he was in the sixth grade. As he got older, he modified his plans. A gifted student, he is now a focused twenty-two-year-old who will graduate from the University of Minnesota this spring with a degree in the most improbable yet weirdly popular field imaginable: journalism.

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Vadim Lavrusik

Lavrusik is not unaware of the tectonic shifts that are reshaping journalism today. As careers go, there may be no bigger question mark than “reporter.” Still fluent in Russian, Lavrusik speaks suburban Minnesotan in the pure, uninflected cadences peculiar to this part of the world. “I really don’t remember hearing that newspapers were going to crap until my junior year,” he says. “It’s only been in the last year or so that it’s been in your face all the time. It gets to the point that you get sick of hearing about it—and hearing it from an older generation that is just bitching and moaning about how things used to be.”

I’m talking to Lavrusik in the clean, well-lit spaces of The Minnesota Daily, a nationally revered pillar of campus journalism for decades. Lavrusik is editor in chief and copublisher for this school year. The paper’s hushed, techie newsroom and business offices sprawl through the fourth floor of a nondescript brick building on University Avenue in the shadow of the new TCF Bank football stadium. When I ask Lavrusik what’s going to fix journalism, he shrugs. “I think we will,” he says.

Journalism, of course, is dying. Ask anybody. Newspapers—the institutional bedrock of American journalism—shed 2,400 full-time reporting jobs in 2007, roughly 5 percent of the newsroom workforce. The final number for 2008 is expected to be around 4,000, with increasingly steep losses predicted into the foreseeable future. (A heavy spate of year-end staff reductions around the country threatens to drive 2008 newsroom losses much higher than anticipated.) The growing wave of layoffs and buyouts is the result of what newspaper managers call a “broken business model” and a trail of highly leveraged ownership switches that have left many urban dailies swamped with debt. The fortunate few unburdened by excessive debt are beholden to impatient shareholders demanding higher returns when none are in the offing. It is hard, frankly, to imagine a business model in which a product with rising costs and diminishing revenues ever again becomes a going concern. Which is another way of saying that the problem with newspapers is structural—that they are now a strictly bad to worse proposition. In 2007, print advertising revenue dropped 10 percent. Last year’s figure could end up as high as 14 percent, with the coming years sure to be increasingly dire. Circulation? Down among most metropolitan dailies, especially on Sundays, a once-reliable money-maker. Last October, the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it would move online and cease publishing a print edition after 100 years in the business.

All these problems have landed right here in the Twin Cities, where the two daily newspapers seem to be racing each other toward the grave. The problems are particularly stark at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where, despite staff reductions, the current owner, Avista Capital Management, has defaulted on the debt it took on to purchase the paper two years ago. Last fall, Minnpost.com media columnist David Brauer estimated the value of the Star Tribune at $125 million—a fraction of the $530 million Avista paid for the paper two years ago. More recently, Brauer told me his estimate might really be more like a guess because it’s unclear whether there’s any rational market for newspapers at all. The Star Tribune could in any case be bought for pennies on the dollars that have been sunk into it. Bankruptcy, merger, or simply going out of business are all in the realm of possibility for the paper.

What happened? Everybody knows the answer to that one too. Content—the news—has fled to the 24-7 world of cable television and the Internet, where a dizzying profusion of online media and blogs—plus a handful of national newspapers—are now only a click away anytime, anywhere. Same thing for revenue, though in their move onto the Web certain categories of advertising have been spectacularly decoupled from content. There’s no news on CraigsList.

The physical evidence of all this arrives on our doorsteps in stark black-and-white every day. Newspapers are shrinking before our eyes, getting smaller and thinner, threatening to vanish altogether. But is the death of journalism killing journalism school? Nope. Crazily, it’s just the opposite. The same forces inimical to the American newspaper are producing a bumper crop of would-be journalists. The University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication—my alma mater—is the only unit in the College of Liberal Arts with its own admissions review. The school turns away one in four applicants—not to keep students out, but merely to stay at a manageable size. Enrollment, currently at about 1,100 undergraduates, is maxed—and has been for years. Journalism is the most popular liberal arts major.

Last fall, I spent a few weeks revisiting Murphy Hall, the East Bank home base for the journalism school. It was like looking ahead and back in time simultaneously. Journalism may be in flux, its future in peril, but it has always been thus. My generation was warned that evening newspapers would die. They did.

Vadim Lavrusik says he really isn’t interested in working for a newspaper. “My dream job would be to work for an online news source,” says Lavrusik. He says he’d be thrilled to work for a site like Politico.com or the local Minnpost.com and that the lessons he’s learning in journalism school are “still going to apply.” Journalism isn’t really dying, Lavrusik tells me, it’s only evolving. Lavrusik sees a future in which the daily newspaper is actually a weekly in print, with daily stories posted continuously online. Other forms, he says, will narrow their focus to occupy specialized niches covering politics or business or sports or the arts—everything—without the artifice of neutrality. “I think we’ll move away from fairness and objectivity as the central paradigm,” says Lavrusik.

Whoa.

“Our generation is pretty optimistic,” Lavrusik says. “The public still wants storytelling, and they want it from people who are paid to go out and get news and get it right. I think we can make journalism work again, probably mostly on the Internet. Do some of us still hope to work for The New York Times someday? Sure. That’s the beacon. But the trends are clear. It’s likely going to have to be something else.”

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Allison Wickler

The word storytelling gets used a lot at the journalism school these days. So here’s a story: Every weekday during the school year, 20,000 free copies of the Minnesota Daily are distributed to campus news racks. By the end of the day, they are all gone. On Thursday afternoons, Lavrusik meets with his editors in a sunny room to map out upcoming stories for the week ahead. There is a lot to talk about. The pace is hectic and the stakes are sometimes high. The Daily covers campus issues closely—the paper’s examination of rising tuition costs has been relentless (ironically, funding for the Daily comes from mandatory student fees and grants from the U)—and grabs what it can from the larger world. The paper’s coverage of the I–35W Bridge collapse was regarded as among the best by any news source. This is hard work. “My schedule is very tight,” says Allison Wickler. “But I work best that way. It’s a constant rhythm. I don’t remember what it was like before I did this.” Wickler, a twenty-one-year-old senior from Pewaukee, Wisconsin, was the Daily’s managing editor until December. She helped Lavrusik oversee a staff of thirty-two reporters. Reporters work a twenty-five-hour week and earn at least $8.75 an hour. With incentive bonuses, Lavrusik will make $34,873 during his twelve-month appointment as editor in chief. These just might be the best journalism jobs these kids will ever have. Lavrusik tells me that when he recently had lunch with last year’s editor, who now works at a newspaper in outstate Wisconsin, she asked him to pay.

“In absolutely every class, we talk about how there won’t be any jobs for us,” says Wickler. “I honestly don’t know how I can believe that. I work with so many talented people that I can’t imagine there won’t be a place for them in journalism.”

I catch up with Lavrusik one Tuesday morning for back-to-back classes. First up is a seminar led this fall by the Star Tribune’s lightning-rod metro columnist, Nick Coleman. Coleman’s class—Editorial and Opinion Writing—is an experiment in a form that seems to be dying even a little faster than newspapers themselves. “I’m not even sure it’s relevant anymore,” Coleman will tell me later. Coleman laments the fact that all opinions have come to have “equal value” and that the distinction between factual newsgathering and opinion writing are breaking down. “Nobody has to defend their opinion,” Coleman says. “Or argue it. So this is where we are headed. Be careful what you wish for. A level playing field may not be all that great.”

Coleman, a Murphy Hall alumnus, was editor in chief of the Minnesota Daily for the 1971–72 school year. He hands out a column he admires for the class to discuss. It’s a famous Jimmy Breslin piece from 1963. Sent to cover John F. Kennedy’s funeral, Breslin found the guy who dug the President’s grave. The column looks at a day of national sorrow and ceremony from the working stiff’s perspective. It’s brilliant, but—Jimmy Breslin? JFK? Is this journalism or archaeology? Lavrusik and his classmates, after all, don’t remember where they were when Reagan was shot because they weren’t born yet.

Next up is English 1104, Introduction to Literary Nonfiction. Journalism students are required to take a broad distribution of liberal arts credits. Lavrusik likes this class—and right away I do too because today’s lesson is a subject close to my heart: the art of revision. Just when I’m thinking I could listen to this forever, the instructor, graduate student Cory Newbiggin, asks the class a question that stops me cold. “Let’s say you’ve written a personal essay,” says Newbiggin. “You’re the main character. How do you know if it is interesting to other people?”

Man, that is a great question. It’s the question for every writer, really. How do you know what will grab the reader by the throat and not let go? How do you find and cut out that fateful turn of phrase that, against all of your instincts, will invite somebody to stop reading?

As the class kicks this around, I reflect on everything I think I understand after three decades of writing for a living. There are different ways to write well, but in the end every writer who gets it right just knows when it’s right.

A young woman raises her hand. “What I do,” she says, “is I just post everything I write on my blog. If something gets a lot of hits, I know it’s good.”

Doh!

“I think our students see a dynamic media future,” says Al Tims, director of the journalism school. He is sensitive to the fact that the phrase “dynamic future” means one thing to a journalism student and something quite different to a twenty-year veteran reporter with a mortgage, a sagging 401(k), and two kids in college. “We’re telling our students they’ll have an opportunity we didn’t have. They’re going to have a chance to reshape the media culture.”

Whatever that will mean—and nobody knows what it will mean—Tims believes journalism is so fundamental to human society that, while it might change, it will never go away. “Newspapers fill a vital role,” says Tims. “Go anywhere on the planet and you’ll find something performing that function. If the Star Tribune disappeared tomorrow, something would fill that void.”

This is undoubtedly true. But it overlooks an unsettling reality: This is not the order in which change has come. The Star Tribune has not and will not vanish in an instant, leaving a hole in the civic grid to be filled. Instead, newspapers like the Star Tribune are already being replaced bit by bit by new media and new advertising formats. The digital age that is upon us is viral, creating its own spaces to inhabit.

There’s really no way to talk about this without sounding like a curmudgeon. But I’ll try anyway. Let’s accept the Tims doctrine, which holds that journalism is an essential element of a civil society. Has there ever been a better example of this fundamental feature of life as we know it than the American daily newspaper? I don’t think so.

Newspapers integrate the “business model” with the civic obligation to put out the news, straight and without bias. They hire, train, and deploy reporters, check and recheck their stories. Newspapers vet the news and then stand behind what they report. Newspapers set the agenda for other media, including the online and broadcast outlets that are now about to replace them. In an important sense, the daily newspaper is journalism. When it goes away, what faith can we have in what is left? If anyone can be a journalist, who really is one? Hey, you have to be a certain age to remember it, but the medium is the message.

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Emily Cutts

I hear voices.

“I hope everything won’t go online,” says Emily Cutts. “I like to read something I can hold in my hands.” A tiny, jeweled stud on her upper lip catches the first rays of the morning sun streaming into Coffman Union. When I was in school, Coffman was in its industrial-apocalypse phase and looked like the inside of a boiler room. It’s better now.

Cutts, nineteen, is a sophomore. She’s minoring in French, is a music fanatic, claims she is not especially “Internet literate,” and would love to find a job someday writing for an alternative weekly like City Pages, which she adores. Cutts says she and her classmates discuss what’s happening to journalism, though in terms of “a transition rather than a death.” Either way, she’s flexible. “I’m not worried,” she says. “There will always be something else I could do.”

Justin Horwath, a twenty-two-year-old senior, is the Daily’s editorial and opinion editor. When I ask him to name a journalist, he says Hunter S. Thompson. Last fall, Horwath went to a job fair sponsored by the Associated Press. “Everyone I talked to there asked if I had experience working in multimedia,” says Horwath. “That’s what they all want to know. Have you done stories online? On video? Slide shows?”

It’s the awful truth of the times we live in. If a picture is worth a thousand words, why bother with the thousand words?

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Justin Horwath

“Well, I’ve thought about this a lot,” Horwath says. “I can’t see everything being online. I can’t see any reason to be pessimistic if journalism is what you want to do. You have to see a future in it. I couldn’t go on if I was really pessimistic.” A political science/history major, Horwath adds that he’s also considering law school.

Simon Heuer, who’s twenty-two and a senior, told me that if journalism doesn’t work out for him he plans to go into the ministry. Heuer is from Fairmont. His high school didn’t have a school paper, but he says he’s always been good at writing. God willing, Heuer says, he will become a sports reporter. Heuer is having a go at it through a special Pioneer Press field course, in which he gets to cover high school sports. Writing game stories and features is great, Heuer tells me, though the newsroom in St. Paul is a little depressing because of “all the empty desks.”

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Simon Heuer

Heuer is one of sixteen students in Jay Weiner’s class, Journalism 4990: Sports Reporting Beyond the Game. This is the third time Weiner has taught the course. He took a Star Tribune buyout after thirty years as a sports reporter, twenty-eight of them in Minneapolis. He tells me he has no reservation about training a new generation of journalists. “If anybody believes the demise of newspapers is discouraging to students, they’re not talking to any twenty-year-olds,” says Weiner. “Journalism students do not read newspapers. They read the Web version of newspapers.” His students hope to work in TV or radio or—the ultimate—to write for an online sports outlet like espn.com, says Weiner, and those jobs will be there. “We’re not looking at a big change that’s coming to journalism. The change is already here.”

Getting through it will be tough. Rick Edmonds is a media business analyst with the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida. Edmonds says it is unclear whether newspapers can hang on long enough to make a profitable transition to online formats. “Part of the problem now is that the settling in of this big downturn for newspapers has been engulfed by the larger economic crisis,” says Edmonds. “It’s going to make this transition period all the more difficult.” He thinks it will likely be another five years before online business models gain a foothold toward profitability. Meanwhile, says Edmonds, “we’ll continue to see what we’re seeing right now. Newspapers will get a lot smaller.”

Edmonds isn’t entirely pessimistic. He says there’s still a long way to go before newspapers disappear or convert entirely to online distribution. “Even with all the losses they’ve suffered, the daily newspaper is still the biggest game in town.”

It’s a warm day in late September. The sky is overcast. Looking out the windows of Room 214 in Murphy Hall, I can see a flutter of still-green leaves on the ash and linden trees lining the Church Street pedestrian mall. Two dozen students, mostly women, have taken their seats at long tables facing the front of the room where Gayle Golden—a smart, energetic former reporter who’s been teaching at the school for ten years—is about to begin the day’s lesson on how to report spot news. That is, hard news as it happens. The class is Journalism 3101: News Writing and Reporting.

This is the basic intro class in which generations of journalism students have written their first stories. Including me. I took this same class, in this same room, thirty-three years ago. Things have changed. Back then it was Journalism 1101. It was taught by George Hage, a legend who enforced a single, rigid rule: Thou shalt not commit a factual error. I notice that the building has been renovated. The ceiling is lower, the lighting is better, and the typewriters are gone. The trees outside used to be elms. I also recall that it was always cold in September back then, but I might be wrong about that. Our heroes were alive. Mailer. Wolfe. Capote. Woodward and Bernstein. Today’s are electromagnetic. Politico.com. TheHuffingtonPost.com. Espn.com. Twitter.com.

As Golden begins, smiling and leaning toward the class, it is apparent that even the meaning of the phrase “news as it happens” is different now. “As recently as five years ago,” says Golden, “I would have taught this lesson on the assumption that if you got a story that broke after last night’s paper was printed you would then basically have all day to work on it for tomorrow’s paper.” What used to be the daily pulse of journalism has been swept away by the Internet, says Golden. Today’s reporters must work, in effect, as only wire reporters used to—filing stories on the fly and continually updating and adding on to them as events warrant.

Golden takes the class through several versions of a recent story from The New York Times. When she gets to the final update, it turns out that it was the first—and only—version to run in the actual newspaper. Everything before it had gone online as new facts were uncovered. News as it happens as it happens.

Of course, if you read the Times online, any distinction between the digitized version and the “real” newspaper is meaningless, and you could reasonably ask what purpose the printed version serves, as it is essentially bereft of news. The printed newspaper has become an odd species of historical document that is filled with recent events you likely already know about or don’t care about. The steady disappearance of newsprint is no mystery. What is surprising is that newspapers still exist at all when both parties involved—the people who write them and the people who read them—have moved on to other “platforms.” Golden and other faculty members at the journalism school have found that about the only way to get students to read newsprint is to have them blog about what’s in the papers.

Golden tells me later that, while journalism is changing, the essentials of this basic skills course are no different from those I remember. What is important enough to be news? Is a story fair? Is it well sourced? How do you know what you know? And, above all, is it right? Accuracy is the immutable currency of journalism—reporters know no greater grief than the widespread public belief that the news is biased, opinionated, and likely to be false. “Technology is not changing the way we do this,” says Golden. “This is the same timeless stuff that journalism schools have always taught. There is the reality of a changing workplace. But it’s all still really about telling stories. Stories that are true and fair.”

Golden concedes she’s had to come to terms with not knowing where a journalism education will lead nowadays. “When these big changes really set in, I saw the students as lemmings—you know, marching over a cliff,” says Golden. “It seemed like they were jumping off into an industry that can’t support them anymore. I don’t feel that way now. I’m telling my students to be mindful of what’s happening. But journalism is a course of study that is still pretty useful. These are skills they can carry into other lines of work.”

Other lines of work. I phone Lee Becker, a professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia, who studies the people who study journalism. Becker reminds me that only about one in five journalism students actually goes into the news business and that it’s long been that way. Journalism majors have always been more likely to go into fields like corporate communications, public relations, advertising, politics. Becker says journalism school enrollment is up—the most recent tally showed a 2 percent increase in 2007—in part because students are ignoring what is happening to the newsgathering industry, where “major news organizations are under siege” but not the news itself. “I just don’t think students are focused in that way,” says Becker. “Their interests are broader. They don’t see their future tied to one segment of the industry. They understand that journalism is going to be practiced outside of the major organizations.”

Al Tims tells me pretty much the same thing. Even though online media don’t yet generate the revenue required to sustain the broad daily enterprise of reporting that newspapers have always done, he says that that day is coming. “For the last decade or so, we’ve told our students not to identify themselves in terms of specific media,” Tims says. “Ways will be found to develop the revenues that can support online news operations. Our core concept is that you’re here because you’re a storyteller. And if you tell important stories, people will pay attention to them.”

Nobody goes into journalism to get rich. Never have, never will. Among the fraction of journalism grads who actually become reporters, only a handful will ever write a bestseller or find themselves on the lecture circuit. Gayle Golden tells me that her students are motivated by the same things that have always motivated journalists: a desire to tell the truth, to get close to momentous events and prominent people, to tell the public what it needs to know.

“Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid to do this,” says Vadim Lavrusik. “We get paid to write. A lot of people would do this for free. I guess we’re doing this because we think it’s important. And because somebody has to.”

All right, then. Journalism is dead. Long live journalism!

William Souder is a Twin Cities journalist with credits that include The Washington Post and Harper’s.