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.

Photo by Makistrunc

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.