A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Extra, extra, hear all about it. Have we got some news for you. The state of New York is doing away with allowing kids as young as 11 to deliver newspapers.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Like newsies?
MARTÍNEZ: Kind of like that, those kids are on their bikes tossing freshly printed newspapers on the doorsteps in the early morning. Now, newsies started delivering papers as early as 1833. That's according to the nonprofit Poynter Institute. Today, there are fewer papers to deliver as local publications scale back due to falling advertising revenue and also the prevalence of online news. The Local News Initiative reported last year that overall circulation has decreased by more than 60% since 2005.
MARTIN: OK, so let's look back at this classic youth job.
MARY SNYDER: I just had inky fingers basically for two years straight (laughter).
MARTIN: That's Mary Snyder (ph). She is now a senior writer with OnMilwaukee.
MARTÍNEZ: In the 1980s, 12-year-old Snyder and her friend were the only paper girls on the block delivering the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel both after school and on Sundays.
SNYDER: It was a seven-day-a-week job because six days a week, you had the afternoon paper, but then we also had the Sunday morning paper was the journal. So on Sunday mornings was when we had to get up at 4:30 in the morning, sub the papers and, you know, go deliver them.
MARTÍNEZ: Snyder says she made 20 bucks a week.
MARTIN: Don Espanol's (ph) experience was a little more relaxed in William, West Virginia.
DON ESPANOL: I was able to deliver any time of the day that I wanted. As long as someone got the paper that day, it was fine.
MARTIN: Now a developer for IT business apps, delivering papers was the first time he felt like a working person.
MARTÍNEZ: Right. I mean, yeah, having a paper route, a huge responsibility. You handle receipt books, hold bags of cash, sell subscriptions and accomplish a set task every day.
MARTIN: Alicia Modestino is an expert in youth employment at Northeastern University.
ALICIA MODESTINO: It turns out, when you talk to young people or survey them, one of the things that they develop over the summer, in addition to soft skills, is really good work habits.
MARTÍNEZ: But with the decline of iconic jobs, such as having a paper route, how are kids getting work experience after school and in the summer? Modestino says retail and restaurant jobs are popular among teens today, and many are even looking at jobs that can help them develop mentally.
MODESTINO: It's very common for young people to be doing overnight camps or internships or volunteering, other kinds of things that look good on a college resume.
MARTIN: So one chapter closes, another one opens. But don't forget babysitting. That's still around.
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