By Darren Johnson
Campus News
A well-intentioned department in New York City government is tasked with making sure news boxes in the boroughs are insured and up to snuff, and I have to get a notarized statement quarterly attesting that my newspaper’s boxes are in good shape, free of graffiti, used diapers and the like, so I recently did my quarterly tour, checking them out, pulling the bad ones, cleaning them inside and out, but I also did my usual surveying of other publications.
Free publications in the City have a history — some were quite wild, back when Times Square was Times Square — but such excitement has faded, as porn shops turned into mini Disney Worlds, and the types of risque ads that used to fund such papers went away, along with the vices they promoted.
But free papers still exist all over the City. In the outer boroughs, many are simply community papers that just happen to be free (people don’t want to pay for newspapers anymore). But in Manhattan (aka, “the City”), where Campus News and so many other papers have a presence, most papers are more niche in nature.
In certain neighborhoods, we have these nice communal kiosks, as seen above, which we share with other papers, along with the traditional boxes, as seen to the right. 
I’ve been picking up papers forever, and I’m no longer young. I stick around these news boxes sometimes, and notice people of all ages, races, etc., pick up these newspapers.
But during my recent tour, I was a bit disappointed with my free newspaper haul. See photo below.
Most of the papers in these kiosks and boxes now are quite corporate. Many have the same ownership group. They centralize production, writers are professional but not really engaged in the subject matter the publication is supposed to be about. They are designed efficiently, robotically.
The Village Voice, once the No. 1 alt-weekly ever in the history of the world — so fun and addicting you couldn’t not take one — has made a bit of a comeback as a monthly after a long hiatus. While professionally written — there’s nothing wrong with it — it just isn’t provocative. I give them props, though, having worked on similar startups, but the overall feel is just a bit off. It’s kind of a Xerox of an alt-weekly. I’m sure, technically, Bob Dylan’s new albums are as good as ever — just few people bother to get the new ones. That “it” is gone.
But with printing costs going up, and advertisers becoming more squeamish about a publication’s content, how do you recapture that magic while still paying the bills?
Dan’s Papers distributes widely in the City. I went to college on the East End of Long Island, where it’s based. A guy named Dan, of course, started the paper as a young man, and it took off, as the East End saw a real estate boom (the Hamptons, lovey). I would pick up Dan’s Papers, read it while lifeguarding or whatever, and be pleasantly amused by Dan Rattiner’s slice-of-life stories about living on the East End. They weren’t James Thurber quality, but they were more prolific and different than what you’d normally find in a newspaper.
But Dan apparently had his paper bought by a corporate group recently. While the paper still resembles a Yellow Pages of old with similar thickness and ads, poor Dan is now just an icon, a Colonel Sanders. His one piece that still runs in the paper has no flair; it is in a struggling style similar to how my student journalists would write for the Suffolk County Community College newspaper. His Facebook posts used to have a few witty observations, some unique turns of a phrase. Now the posts are about “The Top 10 Power Brokers of the Hamptons” or “Behind the Hedges: The Top Real Estate Sales South of the Highway,” or something like that.
I posted the picture below on my Facebook page. A friend of mine, who lives in the Hamptons, wrote:
“Dan’s transformation is hilarious to me for very personal reasons. I know from the inside that, whatever the sometimes questionable end results, there was a big emphasis on original content relating to the East End. Putting that together every week with a small staff was incredibly stressful but it was able to get granular about some really small town stuff. Now it’s cobbled together from up-island “news” items, press releases, profiles of local religious leaders(!), and random obituaries. It’s hilarious to think how hard some people worked to prevent it from turning into that, and how quickly it devolved into being just that.”
Maybe there’s no hope for free papers to ever be good again. Dan’s Papers is surely a financial juggernaut, so they must have tapped into something, but where has all the fun gone?
The wacky, often poorly drawn cartoons? The edgy columns detailing raw human emotions? Does anyone have their finger on the pulse of the real people who populate the streets of New York City? The kind of people who pick up free papers?
Or has the pandemic proven to be the final straw. The mom and pops are gone — or they at least are now advertising on social media and Google — and all that are left are the corporate advertisers. And they want corporate papers.
Maybe I’m the one suffering from nostalgia.
Darren Johnson (right) ran a zine in the 1990s, then graduated to community journalism, and then college journalism, and now owns Campus News, a multi-college independent paper, as well as a small community paper in Upstate New York. Write to him at editor@cccnews.info.
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