Classmate Profile: John Surico
When the time came to fly the nest, his sisters stayed suburban, but John Surico was drawn to the city. Surico left behind the space and comfort of the suburbs and followed his heart to the concert jungle and continues to dig for the truth in New York.
Surico grew up on the Nassau County side of Long Island. His parents are Italian Brooklyn natives. “My great grandparents did that whole kit and kaboodle past the Statue of Liberty and everything,” he says. “We’ve been here since the turn of the century and kind of never left.”
Surico is now a proud resident of Queens.
His childhood went like most of those who grew up just outside the city’s borders. During Christmas time, he’d attend the Rockettes, the tree at Rockefeller and the lights at Saks. “Going in for those things,” he says, “that was always a big deal.”
But it wasn’t New York’s glitz and glamor that drew Surico in. He says he doesn’t quite know what made him gravitate so strongly to the city–but it becomes apparent when he describes his time spent reporting here.
“I kind of grew a love for journalism around the time of Obama,” he says. Originally wanting to cover Washington politics, but needing to get his foot in the door first, Surico started out covering the 2013 New York Mayoral race when Bill de Blasio got elected.
“I was covering all sorts of different topics and that kind of pushed my knowledge of this city a lot more,” he says.
Surico later covered the 2016 presidential campaign trail. Traveling the nation, he gained valuable experience in political journalism and reporting on issues important to Americans. “I really didn’t like it that much,” he says.
“It was cool going to New Hampshire and getting to go to all these student rallies and seeing all that. But I really didn’t like the kind of work,” Surico says of his campaign trail beat. “It felt like we were just producing content, you know, I didn’t feel all that attached to the work I was doing.”
Surico returned to New York. Back at Vice, he wanted to turn his eyes and ears towards local New York issues. Continuing on a previous beat involved in criminal justice, Surico expanded his range of focus.
His editor pitched him a transit project, to cover the New York City subway as a local beat for Vice. “Yeah, sure. I mean, it took the subway every single day,” Surico says, “but I didn’t really think about it that much beyond that. And then I kind of fell into this rabbit hole that became my whole life.”
At the time, 2017, New York’s subways were in decline, breaking down, flooding, and thus disturbing the flow of the city.
“A lot of my work was around the L train or what was going to be the L train shutdown,” he says. “It was a huge new story because of how many people it was going to affect. So this was a big project.”
His favorite story from the transit project? Profiles of teens on the subway.
“I did a series of profiles of specific advocates along the L train that were kind of involved in this fight [over the shutdown]” he says. “I did one on how it affects kids, so I interviewed all these high schoolers.”
“As a child, you know, as it’s like learning the City subway as a kid, it was really interesting because that was something I wasn’t used to,” Surico says of his profile subjects. Once he started to reach out, he only became more connected to other teens wanting to talk about their commute (and parents wanting their kids featured in a Vice article).
Attached to a picture of each young commuter is their name, school and commute time. Io Perl Strahan, a Junior at the time attending Hunter College High School (94th Street) with a forty minute commute told Surico about her new course of action for the shutdown, including a different walk and different train.
“It’ll probably be closer to an hour,” Strahan says. “But it’s gonna be my second semester of my senior year, so it’s not like live or die if you’re late. And I’m probably not gonna get suspended. I’ll be fine.”
