Darren Johnson started Campus News, a newspaper that hits dozens of New York colleges and has scores street boxes in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens, 15 years ago, when he was a community college journalism instructor and student newspaper adviser.
Before that, he was a community journalist — at one point named the New York Press Association Writer of the Year and published widely, including in The New York Times — and had also run college PR/marketing offices.
The latter positions were the final piece of the puzzle Johnson needed to propel him from writer to publisher, as now he had acquired the skills to create business plans and monetize via advertising.
Along with a natural technological ability and the ability to create provocative design layouts, Johnson has one of the most complete journalism skillsets in academia.
Johnson has a terminal degree, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing & Literature from Southampton College, where he also received his Bachelor’s with a double major in English/Writing and Pre-Law/Sociology.
In recent years, Johnson has served as a Visiting Professor at regional colleges; currently Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, where he teaches Journalism and advises both the student paper and the campus radio station.
Now in his third year at MCLA, he has innovated both to include convergent media and repurposing interviews for print, the web, podcasts, FM radio broadcasts and more. Students Johnson has mentored graduate with a wide range of hands-on media tools and abilities that help them them become employable in a radically changing field. He regularly speaks at national college media conferences.
In 2019, the newspaper in his hometown of Greenwich, NY, The Journal & Press (est. 1842), announced it was going out of business and thus the region would become a news desert, as no other media directly serves rural Southern Washington County.
Johnson bought the weekly paper and relaunched it, fixing its business model, redesigning it to an all-color 40-page tabloid, adding more journalism features, and actually grew its print circulation in an era when practically all papers are shrinking. He also tripled its social media presence to 10,000 local followers, added a Weekly Newspaper Podcast, created a daily newsletter that’s raising $1000 a month via subscribers, and, currently, is working with the local community to separate out The Greenwich Journal from The Salem Press — the two papers had merged as The Journal & Press 55 years ago, but soon will be independent again.
Johnson not only teaches journalism with an academic expertise in technology, community journalism and journalism history, but also practices it as a proven innovator in the field.
Want to team up in some way? Contact Darren Johnson at editor@cccnews.info.