Celebrating Ticker Alumni: Lia Eustachewich

Courtesy of Lia Eustachewich

Maya Demchak-Gottlieb, Editor-In-Chief

The Ticker, founded in 1932, is the student-run newspaper of City College’s Downtown Campus and 2022 is the newspaper’s 90th anniversary. To honor and celebrate the legacy of The Ticker and the members who have kept it running, the News section will be publishing profiles of former Ticker members throughout the years.

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Lia Eustachewich, a Baruch College and Ticker alumna, is a journalist and the managing editor of news for The New York Post, where she has worked for almost 10 years.

While at Baruch, Eustachewich was a sports reporter, opinions editor and eventually news editor for The Ticker.

“When I started at The Ticker, I was a sports reporter — I knew nothing about sports,”

Eustachewich said. “My first internship in college was at The New York Daily News as a high school sports reporter, something I also had no idea about. So The Ticker really helped me learn on the fly and learn to really be adaptable.”

Eustachewich also said The Ticker brought her and her friends together.

“Me and my friends at the time really found each other at The Ticker,” she said. “We were just like such a mishmash of people coming from all different backgrounds, all different places.”

She cherishes the memories of working together late at night to produce the paper.

“I love those moments — we would all sit down and eat dinner together like one big happy family,” she said.

Prior to becoming the managing editor of news, Eustachewich was the criminal justice editor at The New York Post, where she oversaw reporters that cover the New York Police Department and New York City courts.

“My day-to-day was kind of crazy because we’re very focused on the web and we’re also focused on the paper,” she said. “My day would involve fielding pitches from all of my reporters, making sure that follow-up stories on stories from the day before are being worked on and being looked at. And then a lot of my day involved editing.”

It was after Eustachewich gained experience with court and police reporting that she realized her passion for it.

“I said well I really want to be in New York City, and I really want to be a tabloid reporter, I want to cover the city crime and breaking news, and I want to be in the city doing this because New York City’s the biggest location for journalism,” she said.

However, she said that to pursue this dream, she had to take a risk.

“I did turn down a full-time job in Florida for a part-time position at the New York Post,” Eustachewich said. “It was a very risky time, but I was young, and it was a risk definitely worth taking.”

Eustachewich said she enjoyed how court reporting gave her an up-close look at the justice system.

“I realized I love court so much because I was learning so much about the criminal justice system that I feel like a lot of people don’t understand and you learn so much about how the city operates,” she said.

When court reporting, Eustachewich said she often references official court documents to see the angle of the story.

“I’m a big lover of court documents and indictments and complaints and I love that kind of stuff because you can really sink your teeth into it,” she said. “If you read between the lines on some stuff stories pop out and oftentimes that’s where the hidden story is.”

In her current role as managing editor of news, Eustachewich said she is working on recuiting more people and evaluating the schedule for efficiency.

“I’m really focused on making reporters’ lives better and empowering them,” she said. “I really want to do that as a managing editor of news, but I also know that we can work more efficiently and so I’m working toward that.”

Eustachewich said her experiences at The Ticker and the opportunities she obtained as a result had a large impact on her life and career journey. She encouraged students at Baruch to take advantage of  different opportunities.

“Be versatile, take chances, go for that internship in that field that you may not be comfortable with because it could really open a lot of doors that you didn’t expect,” she said. “It did for me.”