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<\/p>\nBy Darren Johnson
Campus News<\/p>\n
In case you didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
But I got last-second word his 2002 Jeep broke down, and he couldn\u2019t do it. He insinuated he\u2019s done for good. So I packed up my rusting high-mileage Jeep Compass, which also isn\u2019t a spring chicken, and made the trip down from pretty far Upstate to Manhattan yesterday to fill the boxes myself.<\/p>\n
During the pandemic, this was really not that hard to do, as there wasn\u2019t much traffic on the streets. Yesterday, there was a lot more traffic, but it wasn\u2019t unmanageable, maybe thanks to the newish Congestion Pricing that has taken effect.<\/p>\n
So I parked across from Guttman Community College, where we have boxes, near Bryant Park. It has a merry-go-round\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A woman was yelling \u201cShut up!\u201d over and over.<\/p>\n
I had gotten us into these kiosks all over the City just before the pandemic. It saved the paper, because otherwise we\u2019d have no way to distribute.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
That\u2019s Dan\u2019s 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 \u2014 like the one I used to work for there \u2014 and turn them into essays of sorts.<\/p>\n
If you think about it, what he did was essentially what 99% of Substack \u201cjournalists\u201d do today. He was ahead of this time.<\/p>\n
Anyway, Dan\u2019s also has Manhattan and Palm Beach editions \u2014 wherever there are rich folks.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure any of the papers in these kiosks are actually about Manhattan, from a community news standpoint.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
The boxes are often littered. I guess my normal delivery guy was leaving the plastic straps behind, generally not a good thing.<\/p>\n
In another box yesterday, I also found a tray of moldy food. Twice over the years, I found knives. Another time, a Rubik\u2019s Cube.<\/p>\n
It also appears the delivery guy had missed some boxes, as they had older issues of Campus News in them, though it\u2019s impossible to do such a route 100% perfectly, as all kinds of mayhem can prevent you from getting to one box or the next.<\/p>\n
This one had scaffolding put around it.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
When that happens, I just use the box of a paper no longer in business, like The Village Voice\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
If they advertise with us and notice an uptick in downstate calls, that may be the reason.<\/p>\n
I also often run our local library column in it because we have good presence near this little library.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
I loaded up this wagon several times and did many blocks from 35th and 5th all the way down to the 50s and 2nd\u2026<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\u2026and 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
The lesson for me was I need to get a new delivery guy! I hadn\u2019t 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Darren JohnsonCampus News In case you didn\u2019t know, I own the monthly paper called Campus News. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-179207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}