Actually, "delivered to your front door" is a phrase that probably dates me. Of the relatively few people who still receive a newspaper at home, even fewer actually get it placed in or even near their front door. Most of the time, it's thrown into your driveway or placed in a newspaper tube in front of your house.
Another highly visible change is in the people who still deliver newspapers. When I was growing up, those people were almost always kids with paper bags slung over their shoulders. Nowadays, they're almost always adults driving cars.
I understand the economics of this. Newspapers, which are running on razor-thin profit margins, are better served giving larger routes (i.e., hundreds of customers) to adults than smaller routes (i.e., dozens of customers) to kids.
But that doesn't mean I don't miss the prototypical paper boy/girl. I was one myself.
Back in the early 80s, I delivered The Lake County News-Herald to 40 or so customers in my Wickliffe neighborhood. I had the brown and orange News-Herald paper bag, and every day I would make sure those customers received the news of the world.
This is back when people actually got their news from print newspapers, of course, and not from phones, tablets, iPods, etc.
I never minded delivering the papers. That part was actually kind of fun. It was the collecting I hated. Every two weeks you had to walk around to your customers' houses and hound them to pay you. And for some people, you really did have to hound them.
The good part about collecting, though, was that was obviously how you made your money. The lady from the newspaper would come around every two weeks to take the money and leave me with $30 or $40 profit, which I would use at arcades and to buy video game cartridges for my Atari 2600 system. In retrospect, I probably should have saved some of that cash...
I gave up my paper route in 7th grade once I started getting into more extracurricular activities at school. But I returned to the delivery business several years later as a 24-year-old adult.
By that point in my life, I was a full-time sports writer for The News-Herald. We didn't have any kids yet and we needed the extra money, so I took on a paper route. Again, didn't mind the delivering, but the collecting was less than fun.
I only kept that route for about six months, then dropped it once Elissa was born. But two memories stand out in my mind from the experience:
(1) It was fun doing full-service journalism. I would write articles for the paper, edit copy, help lay it out, etc., then get up the next day to actually deliver it, too. How often do you see that in anything other than a really small town?
(2) Mrs. Piacente, one of my customers, would always wait for me to show up with the paper on Saturday mornings. When I got to her house, she would ask what page my weekly Bowling Notes column was on so she could read it (she was a big bowler, that Mrs. Piacente). She would also occasionally ask me to do little odd jobs for her, including knocking the icicles off her house and changing the batteries in her kitchen clock. These were clearly tasks that fell under the "other duties as assigned" section of the paper boy job description.
And now the slow, painful death of newspapers is upon us. The three-day-a-week-home-delivery model, or other scenarios like it, will become increasingly prevalent. And eventually the print newspaper will die out in favor of e-news.
Which I'm actually fine with. But I'll always miss the feel and smell of newsprint. Newspapers have been a part of my life for decades, and they never really go out of your blood.
As long as we're being nostalgic here, may I suggest you watch the following video of a song written by a favorite artist of mine named David Francey? It documents his experiences as a paper boy back in his native Scotland. It's a tune I almost could have written myself. Enjoy:
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