By Darren Johnson
Campus News
In case you didn’t know, I own the monthly paper called Campus News. It started in 2010 and hits colleges and news boxes and, since Covid, has retracted a bit to mostly just hit New York Metro. It used to go much further, even into border states.
I’ve had a delivery guy who lives in Yonkers the past several years. I drop the papers to him, and he hits the street news boxes you may see in the City during the wee hours, before traffic brews.
But I got last-second word his 2002 Jeep broke down, and he couldn’t do it. He insinuated he’s done for good. So I packed up my rusting high-mileage Jeep Compass, which also isn’t a spring chicken, and made the trip down from pretty far Upstate to Manhattan yesterday to fill the boxes myself.
During the pandemic, this was really not that hard to do, as there wasn’t much traffic on the streets. Yesterday, there was a lot more traffic, but it wasn’t unmanageable, maybe thanks to the newish Congestion Pricing that has taken effect.
So I parked across from Guttman Community College, where we have boxes, near Bryant Park. It has a merry-go-round…
A woman was yelling “Shut up!” over and over.
I had gotten us into these kiosks all over the City just before the pandemic. It saved the paper, because otherwise we’d have no way to distribute.
That’s Dan’s Papers above us. I used to live in the Hamptons, where that paper is from. A guy named Dan would pretty much steal stories from the legitimate local papers — like the one I used to work for there — and turn them into essays of sorts.
If you think about it, what he did was essentially what 99% of Substack “journalists” do today. He was ahead of this time.
Anyway, Dan’s also has Manhattan and Palm Beach editions — wherever there are rich folks.
I’m not sure any of the papers in these kiosks are actually about Manhattan, from a community news standpoint.
The boxes are often littered. I guess my normal delivery guy was leaving the plastic straps behind, generally not a good thing.
In another box yesterday, I also found a tray of moldy food. Twice over the years, I found knives. Another time, a Rubik’s Cube.
It also appears the delivery guy had missed some boxes, as they had older issues of Campus News in them, though it’s impossible to do such a route 100% perfectly, as all kinds of mayhem can prevent you from getting to one box or the next.
This one had scaffolding put around it.
When that happens, I just use the box of a paper no longer in business, like The Village Voice’s.
To save money, I use some of the same printer plates as I do with my Upstate paper, The Journal & Press, so sometimes some local ads get picked up and get free City distribution!
If they advertise with us and notice an uptick in downstate calls, that may be the reason.
I also often run our local library column in it because we have good presence near this little library.
I loaded up this wagon several times and did many blocks from 35th and 5th all the way down to the 50s and 2nd…
…and then we had a bunch of different boxes in this wealthy neighborhood in the 60s through 80s on Madison, with a chauffeur waiting with a Rolls Royce outside this Jeffrey Epstein-style store.
The lesson for me was I need to get a new delivery guy! I hadn’t done this route since the pandemic, and that was a slightly younger version of me, who has been doing paper routes of one sort or the next since age 12, but this one made me quite sore today!