In the US.
I know you specified “in the US” and I suspect that the question is erroneous since the answer will be highly variable, and I bet there are still some places where they exist.
Here in the UK, they have largely been replaced by pensioners.
Do you mean what we would call “a paper round” (delivering newspapers to the door - and why do the kids in US films and TV just chuck it in the general direction of the door? That would never do in the UK) or youngsters calling out the headlines in an effort to sell papers in the street?
If the latter, then in this country the raising of the school-leaving age and restrictions on child labour would have had a lot to do with it. In both countries, the growth of broadcast news would probably have meant less need to be shouting the headlines in the street as each new edition of the paper came out, so WW2 would probably have a lot to do with it.
If the former, a combination of declining demand for home delivery of newspapers, increased competition for youngsters’ time, from school, homework, sports, hobbies, TV/internet, and more money in many families providing less incentive for them to find time to earn some of their own. So maybe from the 60s onwards.
Later than that here - my son was doing a paper round in the early 90s. This was a free paper though - I think that the paper shop stopped delivering around that time as fewer people were prepared to pay.
Of course, the free papers depend on deliveries, or they would have very small circulations.
The Carl Bridgewater murder in 1978 probably put a lot of parents off. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/midland-paperboy-carl-bridgewaters-parents-234316
Or is OP referring to kids selling papers on street corners, extra extra read all about it style?
I was assuming that as well. Even if not, I’d also like to know when those street vendors disappeared (even if they didn’t regularly go around screaming “extra! extra!”)
I have lived in major U.S. cities as well as suburbs for 70 years. I don’t ever recall hearing the “Extra, extra” newsboys anywhere. But of course you can still get the paper delivered to your home.
If you mean door to door delivery of the morning (or afternoon, if any still exist) papers, I know a neighbor’s kid did it when my kids were in HS in the early 80s. Then at some point the papers advertised for people with cars to deliver the papers. Our morning paper now gets delivered by a man in a car. I assume he is moonlighting with a regular day job. I hardly think newspapers could survive without door-to-door delivery.
As for teen-agers, hawking papers on street corners, I don’t think I have ever seen that outside of movies. What I do recall are corner newstands at busy intersections. They were banned in Montreal three decades, but you still see them in NYC–at least in Manhattan. I can’t recall seeing any in Brooklyn.
They’re still quite active - their latest album was released in March of this year.
The newsboy, who would be available on a corner or walking around barking “…read all about it!” vanished along with afternoon daily papers. Papers are morning editions now.
As information moved faster and faster, afternoon editions died out – they became irrelevant. The newsboy, selling papers on city corners, made sense in the afternoon. Papers are early morning editions now, and while some areas still benefit from door-to-door delivery, the corner newsboy would have nothing to sell.
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Locally ‘paper boys’ delivering to your doorstep and collecting monthly subscription charges in our Midwestern suburb stopped sometime in the mid-late 1980’s. Replaced by adults delivering in vehicles and mailed billings.
My middle son still does a paper round here in the UK. He’s 15 and it gives him some money and a reason to get out of bed early.
I’ve done his round a few times for him when he’s been sick. Judging by the houses (bungalows, a few sheltered accomodation places, Rovers or Nissan Micras parked on the driveway), it’s mainly elderly people and those that live too far from the shops. We’re semi rural here so there’s quite a distance between shops.
One person lives 3 doors from the shop and gets their paper delivered, which I can’t understand.
As for the street sellers, the Evening Standard in London used to have a lot of sellers who would shout something like 'eeeeven stan dud". But they’ve been replaced by students mainly since it went free and they are less vocal.
Newsboys were kids who stood on street corners hawking papers. Sometimes called newsies or newspaper hawkers. Were they gone by the 40s?
Two examples of something similar currently exist in Montreal:
[ul]
[li]Free newspapers distributed outside metro stations[/li][li]Newspapers written by the homeless community and sold as an awareness program and job-creation project[/li][/ul]
Though in both cases, the “newsboys” are adult men and women. They don’t yell, but they will call out the name of the paper and ask if you’d like one.
When I lived in the Denver suburbs in the late 70s, it was about at the crossover point from kids to adults with cars. Illustrated by my neighborhood. Denver had two viable Dailies at the time, The Post and The Rocky Mountain News. The Post was being delivered by a kid lugging a bag of papers around on foot. I got the Rocky Mountain News, and a guy cruised by in a car and tossed it on my driveway.
When I grew up, we were on a rural tube route in PA. The lady that drove around stuffing the Erie paper in the plastic tubes was more dependable than the mail service. Horrible blizzards, etc, she’d somehow get around stuffing those papers in the tubes.
(Plastic newspaper tubes displaying the name of the paper and mounted next to rural mailboxes seems to be a peculiarly American thing. The USPS won’t let anything but actual mail be put in mailboxes, as has been kicked around in this forum before.)
Well, you can see people hawking the Daily Racing Form at the racetrack, along with tip sheet vendors. And my boss’s son is selling the local paper at the track, too. But that’s a special case – you have a large number of potential customers who may want to see what the handicappers say about the race. When the track closes at Labor Day, the jobs end.
I grew up in a rural area, so it didn’t exist (it was mostly an urban phenomenon). You had a paperboy who would deliver (I delivered Newday, which was an evening paper, so you could do it after school). The only “extra” I saw was after JFK’s assassination.
When I visited NYC around that time, I never ran into the newsboys. I think they were pretty much gone by 1960.
They were cloned by the Cadmus Project in the 1970s (although I think that all turned out to be traceable back to Darkseid somehow).
I think they are all now in Las Vegas handing out peep show brochures.
There were still a few in the 1940s, but by the 50’s, it would have been pretty rare. Most of the ones I heard about in the 50s were old-timers, who had never done anything else, and still stuck their old street corner.
In high school in the early 50s, ,I worked behind the counter in the only shop in town that sold newspapers, and I probably sold about 100 a day. Maybe half of them to regular customers who came in every day to get their paper. There were three locally distributed papers for which boys had home delivery routes, and there were about 25 boys who had a route of 40-50 customers each, so there may have been over a thousand papers door to door, and a hundred more sold direct in a shop. Distribution might have been different in bigger cities, I can’t speak to that.
The first coin operated machine was invented in 1947