Newspaper hawker
Legally every state considered the newsboys to be independent contractors, and not employees, so they generally were not subject to child labor laws.
Famous Americans that had worked as newsboys included Bruce Barton, Ralph Bunche, Joe DiMaggio, Thomas Edison, Dwight Eisenhower, Sam Rayburn, Walter Reuther, David Sarnoff, Cardinal Spellman, Harry Truman and Mark Twain.
A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy and sell again.Benjamin Franklin is sometimes called the "first American newsboy", as he helped deliver his brother's New England Courant in 1721.
Instead of the adults he expected, his ad drew children: the first was the 10-year-old Irish immigrant Bernard Flaherty, who turned out to be a talented hawker—later a stage comedian—who would cry out the day's most sensational headlines: "Double Distilled Villainy"; "Cursed Effects of Drunkenness!
[7] The local delivery boy pulling a wagon or riding a bicycle while tossing the morning or evening paper onto the front porch was a product of the 1930s.
They designed a prepackaged curriculum in door-to-door subscription marketing that taught newsboys new skills in scheduling time, handling money, keeping accounts, and—especially—presenting a winning salesman persona.
In 1875 a popular writer found them a nuisance: In St. Louis, Missouri, in the first half of the 20th century, reformers and child savers saw the newsboys as potential victims of the dangers and temptations of the urban environment.
[10] In Cincinnati in 1919, charity workers found that a tenth of the teenage boys were news hawkers, and they earned only 20 cents a day (equivalent to $4 in 2023).
[13]: 22 Walt Disney worked as news butcher on the Missouri Pacific Railway as a teenager, and his memories of that experience influenced his design of the Disneyland Railroad.
[14]: 35–40, 222 Stephanie Rains examines the newsboy as a characteristic presence on Irish streets in the early twentieth century and also necessary last link in the chain of media production and distribution.
Newsboys were very visible and audible figures on Irish city streets and were themselves the subject of frequent newspaper stories which typically represented them as exemplars of the urban working classes for middle-class readers.
[25] According to Jon Bekken: During 1933 to 1935, the New Deal agency, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), promulgated a newspaper industry code that restricted juvenile employment in order to help unemployed adults.
There were working on their own as independent young entrepreneurs and Hine captures the image of comradeship, youthful masculinity and emerging entrepreneurship.
