I remember the first day of my Milwaukee Sentinel paper route. It was March, 5:00A.M. The 32 papers were dropped on a corner near my home. I drove my bike, picked up and counted the papers, placed them in my paper “bag” and slid up the hill while it was snowing that cold morning years ago.
I delivered them, biked home and enjoyed a warm breakfast.
I also remember my dad driving me around once each week (early!) with the extra large Sunday edition packed high in our station wagon’s back seat. 132 copies on Sunday.
I also learned about selling newspaper subscriptions and collecting money. The subscription game was, in hindsight rather classic. Give some young kids a prize (“whomever sells the most at tonight’s sales rally, gets a football”). The memory of that evening is clear. I won the football. I had to sell rather hard to get that last sale – the local sales manager drove me to a friend of my grandparents to make that last sale. It’s interesting to think about these things today, 30 years later, in 2005, the internet era.
At the time, I did not grasp the far reaching implications of that last minute sale that gave me a football. Paid circulation was everything. The football was a cheap bonus to motivate the kids in the field. Today, the newspapers offer deals via direct mail, if at all. They’ve lost the family ties (I don’t know how to get it back and I don’t think it’s coming back).
Years later, it seems that few young kids are delivering papers any longer. That income earning opportunity may have left years ago, gone to those old enough to drive cars (and cover a larger area faster than a kid on a bike). I wonder if this loss of a classic early job with its family/community ties (Sunday’s heavy paper required a parent’s support via a car) was one of the many 1000 cuts that is laying the newspaper gently down to die, as Jay Rosen says.
Paper Route links at clusty. Paper Boy Blues The Tipping Point