AACC’s student newspaper, Campus Current, got a new editor-in-chief over the summer.

Fourth-year communications student Johannes Haasbroek said his main responsibility will be to write and edit news stories for the daily digital newspaper. Haasbroek also said he will oversee a small staff of student journalists.

“This is the opportunity for us to learn to do good stories despite the challenges that face us,” Haasbroek said.

When AACC closed its campuses in March as a precaution against coronavirus, Campus Current’s editors temporarily stopped publishing the newspaper’s monthly print edition and expanded its online version, theCampusCurrent.com.

“It’s a lot more challenging to find sources–especially student sources–since they’re not on campus,” Haasbroek said.

Haasbroek moved to Maryland from his native South Africa five years ago and enrolled at AACC as an engineering major. Last semester he changed his major to communications and took Communications 102, a journalism class.

Campus Current’s faculty adviser, Sharon O’Malley, was his professor, and asked Haasbroek to consider becoming the newspaper’s editor.

“I think it’s an amazing opportunity to learn and to grow as a person, a good opportunity to develop leadership skills,” Haasbroek said.

Haasbroek “was sort of a standout in my journalism class,” O’Malley said. “He’s a good journalist; he’s a good reporter and writer. He’s got the commitment that I’m looking for. He’s very reliable, very committed and passionate about journalism, so he was an obvious choice.”

O’Malley said Haasbroek “knock[ed] it out of the park” during a summer Journalism Bootcamp, Communications 112.

Former Campus Current editor-in-chief Christian Richey said he “definitely saw a lot of potential in” Haasbroek when he worked with him last semester, and “saw that he was really engaged with the paper. I think he’s going to do a good job.”

Richey graduated in spring 2020 and transferred to The New School in New York to study journalism.