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A paperboy is someoneoften an older child or distributes printed to homes or offices on a regular route, usually by bicycle or automobile. In Western nations during the heyday of print newspapers during the early 20th century, this was often a young person's first job, perhaps undertaken before or after school. This contrasts with the newsboy or newspaper hawker, now extremely rare in Western nations, who would sell newspapers to passersby on the street, often with very vocal promotion. They were common when multiple daily papers in every cityas many as 50 in New York City alonecompeted.
The duties of a paperboy varied by distributor, but usually included counting and separating papers, rolling papers and inserting them in during inclement weather, and collecting payments from customers.
The number of paperboys experienced a major decline. This is due partly to the disappearance of afternoon newspapers, whose delivery times worked better for school-aged children than did those of morning papers, which were typically delivered before 6 a.m. The numbers have also been affected by changing demographics, the availability of news and newspapers on the Internet; employment laws (particularly the mid-20th century ban of child labour), the decline of small towns that could be traversed by bicycle, and growing concerns for the safety of un-escorted children, all of which have led many newspapers to switch to delivery by adults. Today, they are mainly used by weekly Weekly newspaper and free shopper papers, which still tend to be delivered in the afternoons. Alternatively, sometimes paperboys are only employed once a week to deliver the paper on Sunday. Many deliveries these days are by adults in cars, known as newspaper carriers. They have traditionally been hired by the newspapers as independent contractors.
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