So long, newsboy

As news goes digital, the hawker and the paperboy – or girl – recede into history.

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"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson.

For generations, delivering newspapers was the first paid job of millions of boys and a few girls. Taking around a morning newspaper required a kid to rise well before dawn, trudge or bicycle through city or suburban neighborhoods, tossing newspapers onto stoops or – if you offered the kind of service that led to tips – putting the paper inside a screen door or the milkbox.

Now the newsboy is gone. The milkbox is gone too.

Newsboys in the early 20^th century. Image courtesy Boston Public Library.

Today individual newspaper delivery is in most cases done by adults with cars. Maybe it’s better that way – sending 12-year-olds out on their own before sunrise was always an iffy proposition.

Probably better that the milkman with his van, bringing a quart and collecting old bottles, is gone, replaced by ubiquitous availability of fresh milk in many types of stores.

Lots of aspects of life change. Someday people may experience nostalgia for drive-through burgers or other ephemera that today seem permanent. Home delivery of newspapers by newsboys was a standard for several generations, and now is gone. Here, the New York Times reports on the very last newspaper hawker in Paris.

Gone as well from the rhythms of newsboy life is knocking on doors to collect for the paper. Customers now pay electronically – if they receive a newspaper at all. Twelve-year-olds meeting neighbors at their doors, and learning a little about their neighbors’ lives, is gone.

I get the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal delivered. An adult in a car handles the task. I’ve never met whoever it is.

I pay electronically and send the Christmas tip by mail. The Post lets you tip electronically. I prefer to mail a check, so Jeff Bezos can’t seize the tip. I have no idea if Bezos would do that, but this sounds like the sort of thing you should be wary against.

Digital news costs a great deal less than printing physical papers, moving the bundles around by truck then handing off for “last mile” service. Distributing of papers and magazines has long been plagued by organized crime influence. Add, in a tight labor market, the task of finding adults with cars who are willing to get up at 4:30 a.m. for about what they’d make driving for Door Dash at noon.

Newspaper publishers would love to kiss newsprint goodbye, switching to electrons altogether. They’re pricing to encourage customers to go digital-only: trying to reprogram their demographic not to expect physical papers brought to the door.