By Darren Johnson
Campus News
A year on the streets, with these news boxes, and we learned a lot.
Look at this guy. He got his face kicked in. We put him on a stretcher and put out a fresh soldier.
It was a crazy, retro idea, but I saw longtime publishers like The Village Voice call it quits and pull their boxes off the streets, and then I read about the last-man-standing theory of the newspaper business model. Maybe, as the print journalism industry crumbles, we at Campus News can be proactive and survive this. And come out stronger.
Campus News — our paper that hits colleges — has been in business 10 years now, mostly hitting students via wire racks in student unions, cafeterias and the like. Some colleges in the City are hard to reasonably get to, with all of the traffic most days of the week, so news boxes placed on city property outside the colleges is the logical solution. They can be stocked during early morning hours, before traffic heats up.
However, considering the death spiral most print outlets are stuck in, there’s no such thing as logic, anymore. Surviving in this business is a free-for-all. Don’t listen to the common wisdom, the pundits. Be contrary.
So we got permits, and bought boxes from one of the few companies still making them, and sent out our first battalion of street soldiers. Pickup — the term used in the free newspaper business for the percent of papers taken from racks — has been great. We intend to do more of these boxes in the coming year.
And maybe we’re smarter than most media doomsayers can imagine, being so retro and counter-intuitive.
Look at this pile of newly printed papers — they will almost wholly get picked up and enjoyed by individuals interested in Campus News. Try doing that with any other medium; even digital ads and social media can’t get such engagement.
But it’s rough out there.
This box to the right got abused and graffitied. Gorilla Tape is holding its hinges together, and we’ll replace the door next time we deliver. We’ll also clean it up.
Maybe print journalism is dying because other papers don’t tend to their racks and boxes? Some of them look to be in really poor shape.
However, there are minuses to having brand-new boxes. Some get stolen outright. We return to a corner and the box is gone. We’ve lost five boxes so far, due to theft. Maybe we’ll start hiding GPS trackers in them. They’ve probably been converted to fish aquariums in some skeevy guy’s living room in Queens.
We found — on the mean streets — there’s safety in numbers, and boxes that hang together are less likely to get vandalized. But, boxes that are alone get a higher pickup rate — again, last-man-standing. So how boxes are placed depends on how risk-taking we want to be.
Here’s one of our soldiers hanging out in Long Island City with some other heroes. This box is physically fine.
Occasionally, some boxes will have garbage thrown in them. That hurts pickup rate at that particular box. Why are some people like that? Haven’t they heard of the First Amendment? Manners? There’s a trash can on the corner.
Some people tag the boxes. Some place stickers on them, perhaps promoting a different business.
Running a news box route in a big city isn’t easy.
But it can be fun, and we probably can take what we’ve learned, and expand further in the City, and to other cities.
Sometimes ideas are cyclical, and old can be new again. Our retro boxes are hip!
Instead of whining about the state of the newspaper industry, maybe offer a solution, instead.
Our solution, right now: news boxes. And our boxes are out on the street, fighting the good fight — sometimes literally.
Click to expand:
If you’d like to help us grow, write boxes@cccn.us.
Darren Johnson has been publishing Campus News for a decade. Before that, he worked in other areas of journalism and higher education. He has a novel titled “Prof. Mule.”
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