By Darren Johnson
Campus News
Campus News began about a dozen years ago. Before that, I was advising a student newspaper at one campus of a three-campus community college – really doing everything but the writing – for $7000 a year, and I’d said to the administrator in charge of our budget – hey, if we expand to the other two campuses, I really could grow this thing. Maybe then I could get a raise. But, of course, that would require endless committee meetings, a Last Supper style gathering around a big oaken table – pass the mystery meat wrap, please, and maybe a juice box, thank you – each of the 12 Apostles of the Administration who each earned six figures – endlessly deciding on the fate of a little black-and-white quarter-fold paper, written by kids who barely got out of high school.
Now, not to exaggerate. I was not just earning $7000 a year. I also was adjuncting a course or two, and I had a mid-level position as a PR writer at a different college. I wasn’t a six-figure administrative apostle, but bills were getting paid; though the idea of buying a home wasn’t feasible. When you’re working that much, you don’t have time to toilet paper the many financial bleeds that drain you, the blood sucking the pigment from your hair out of desperation, as it exits your body. Your head now grayer, and your veins now filled with gray dust.
And, still, amid all this, I was able to float enough credit card payments to pay for a print run of Campus News. My idea was the paper would hit multiple campuses. In Suffolk County, Nassau County, Queens and up to Rockland and Westchester. And enough advertisers have supported it to keep it going year after year.
The first boxes of Campus News came from a college publication printer from New Jersey. Their salesman had been hounding me when I worked for the community college paper, and while I couldn’t oblige him then, I figured I’d use his presses for Campus News. Let’s print 10,000!
However, the printer for some reason assumed I was ordering these for the community college, not for my own enterprise. No college worker had ever gone rogue like that before. So they shipped 50 heavy boxes of papers to a satellite of the community college that just happened to be a few blocks away from where I lived.
Some irate culinary worker at that campus called me. I guess I was hard to track down, only being an adjunct in the system, and I quickly went and grabbed them from a loading dock before the 12 Apostles of the Administration could convene and excommunicate me.
When I got the boxes home – they took up my whole living room – I cut a box open with a steak knife and pulled out one copy for my wife to take a photo of me holding. With the knife in my hand, I almost look angry in the photo, but in reality, this was a big moment. I had done my own publications before – but they had all failed. This one would be different. It had advertisers already. It has a purpose. It has an audience. The stories are useful and entertaining. All of my work up until that point had finally crystallized into that one inaugural paper. And now it’s survived nearly a dozen years; despite what Facebook and Google did to local media, despite the pandemic.
And this academic year has been a challenging one, as campuses were shuttered and most advertisers were noncommittal. The writers are still loyal, but there’s no one to deliver or sell ads. So I do those things … again.
This coming fall, as the campuses reopen, Campus News will essentially be starting over – we have to find the next generation of advertisers and re-establish our racks in campus unions and dining halls – and I have more gray hair. But, my gut feeling is, the past dozen years were just a practice run – the best is going to come. …Starting now.
Darren Johnson is publisher of Campus News and an adjunct journalism instructor. To help us in any way, contact editor@cccn.us. Thank you!
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