The first Newsboys.

In the movies, 'newsboys' are portrayed as young boys, hollering at the top of their little lungs, trying to sell a newspaper for some spare change.  However, the picture Hollywood painted of little loveable boys running around the streets of New York city without a care in the world is very different from the reality of what really happened. 

Real newsboys first appeared in the mid 19th century, when a mass circulation of newspapers were on every street corner of New York. They were orphan children that usually didn't have shoes, coats or hats.  Charles Loring Brace, a reformer in 1866, described the homeless street children's condition in this way:

"I remember one cold night seeing some 10 or a dozen of the little homeless creatures piled together to keep each other warm beneath the stairway of The [New York] Sun office. There used to be a mass of them also at The Atlas office, sleeping in the lobbies, until the printers drove them away by pouring water on them. One winter, an old burnt-out safe lay all the season in Wall Street, which was used as a bedroom by two boys who managed to crawl into the hole that had been burned."

In 1872, a man named James B. McCabe Jr. wrote:

"There are 10,000 children living on the streets of New York.... The newsboys constitute an important division of this army of homeless children. You see them everywhere.... They rend the air and deafen you with their shrill cries. They surround you on the sidewalk and almost force you to buy their papers. They are ragged and dirty. Some have no coats, no shoes and no hat." 

1899 was the year when several thousand newsboys (who made about 30 cents a day) called a strike.  They refused to handle newspapers of William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer.  The New York Tribune quoted what Kid Blink (named for being blind in one eye)  had said to 2,000 strikers:

"Friens and feller workers. Dis is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we'se got to stick together like glue.... We know wot we wants and we'll git it even if we is blind."

"The lot of newsboys began to improve as urban child-welfare practices took root, and publishers began competing for newsies by giving them prizes and trips." -Digital History, 2015.