by Michelle Hozey

Created on: March 25, 2009

Paperboys have been downsized. Newspaper owners, in this day and age of technology, are suffering from subscription loss and consequently, advertising loss. The days of personal service are gone, replaced by the Post Office or the Internet. Why? Because it's cheaper.

My dad fondly recalls his days as a paperboy. He said he used to love riding his bicycle all over town, practicing his pitches and being outdoors. When I started working at my hometown newspaper there were a few paperboys, the young boys who rode their bicycles around town, pitching papers into yards and driveways. The boys I knew enjoyed the job because it meant having their own spending money and quality time away from moms and dads and brothers and sisters. The majority of the delivery was done by the poorer people in down with broken down cars, bills to pay and mouths to feed when their other two jobs just weren't cutting it. I always enjoyed watching the big van piled high with bundles of paper fresh from the press a couple towns away (our paper could no longer afford the manpower needed to operate the press machines, so the paper was sent out every day to be printed elsewhere). The carriers sat in their cars or talked in the back of the building, waiting for their job to begin. They would load their bundles of papers into their cars and stock the boys' paper bags full of rolled up papers. The car carriers would then sit in their cars with a handful of rubber bands and roll up each paper into that perfect little cylinder that we're used to seeing on our front stoop.

When I started at the newspaper things were tight. Subscriptions were down. Advertising was down. The number of carriers was down. Very few people were willing to put miles on their own vehicles because they barely broke even when the paycheck came twice a month. The owners couldn't afford to pay them more, so the number of carriers quicly dwindled.

The bosses started asking those of us in the composing department if we could shave some hours off of our days. But with the four of us trying to meet advertising deadlines, composing ads, paginating (laying out) the paper, proofreading and uploading stories and pictures to the Web site we struggled to get things done in the eight hours we had each day. Every day the two of us in ad composition were subjected to the cries of the advertising director that we needed to come up with more ideas, better ideas, to get businesses to advertise and to keep coming back because the majority of a

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