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Paperboy

Boy who delivers newspapers

Note

boys delivering newspapers to subscribers

A paperboy is someoneoften an older child or adolescentwho distributes printed newspapers to homes or offices on a regular route, usually by bicycle or automobile. In Western nations during the heyday of print newspapers during the early 20th century, this was often a young person's first job, perhaps undertaken before or after school. This contrasts with the newsboy or newspaper hawker, now extremely rare in Western nations, who would sell newspapers to passersby on the street, often with very vocal promotion. They were common when multiple daily papers in every cityas many as 50 in New York City alonecompeted.

History

Paperboy license for boys under age 14 in 1970, when girls were not allowed to deliver newspapers in New York State

The duties of a paperboy varied by distributor, but usually included counting and separating papers, rolling papers and inserting them in newspaper bags during inclement weather, and collecting payments from customers.

The number of paperboys experienced a major decline. This is due partly to the disappearance of afternoon newspapers, whose delivery times worked better for school-aged children than did those of morning papers, which were typically delivered before 6 a.m. The numbers have also been affected by changing demographics, the availability of news and newspapers on the Internet, employment laws (particularly the mid-20th-century ban of child labour), the decline of small towns that could be traversed by bicycle, and growing concerns for the safety of unescorted children, all of which have led many newspapers to switch to delivery by adults. Today, they are mainly used by weekly community newspapers and free shopper papers, which still tend to be delivered in the afternoons. Alternatively, sometimes paperboys are only employed once a week to deliver the paper on Sunday. Many deliveries these days are by adults in cars,

References

(11 December 2013). "DESIGN: Those Were The Times - No.24 1943 Movie Stars and Paper Routes".
Julia Malakie. (April 26, 2006). "While you were sleeping, the paperboy grew up".
(June 14, 2012). "Some States Do Not Recognize Newspaper Carriers as Independent Contractors". Kreischer Miller.
Gabrielle Canon. (September 14, 2019). "Late-night win for California newspapers: Lawmakers OK 1-year exemption to AB 5 for carriers". USA Today.

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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