“Where better to escape trouble than a theater?”
So asks the charismatic Miss Medda in the musical Newsies.
Where indeed? I thought to myself as I took in the Saturday matinee of Lyric Theatre’s fall production from a balcony seat at the Flynn in Burlington.
Somehow, I’d never seen the show, which was based on a musical film and inspired by an 1899 newspaper carrier strike in New York City.
Back in those days, competition was fierce between the local dailies — both for news and single-copy sales. They used armies of underage “newsboys” to hawk headlines on the street. Each would buy a stack of “papes” in the morning to sell for a penny per — or starve. Though exploitative and immoral, the arrangement was acceptable enough until New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer decided to raise the price they paid by 20 percent.
That economic injustice prompted his ragtag band of independent contractors to walk off the job. Those working for the rival newspaper, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, joined in solidarity. During the two-week strike, circulation of both papers dropped precipitously, and in the end, the New York City newsboys negotiated a better deal.
In the show, of course, they also sing and dance — a lot.
Getting Seven Days into the hands of our readers is an altogether different story. We still publish a print edition, with ink and paper, and the dozen-plus folks who distribute it gather at our loading dock to pick up their “papes.” But the handoff happens once a week, around 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning, and everyone is a grown-up. After loading their respective cars with bundles of newspapers, they drive off in different directions to bring Seven Days to more than 1,000 locations across northern Vermont.
Although most of them only work one day a week for us, they are considered employees, which means they’re protected by workers’ comp insurance and subject to various payroll taxes; their names appear on the masthead on page 6. One of our most senior delivery technicians, Nat Michael, has been doing a weekly circulation route since we started the paper 29 years ago.
Perhaps most importantly: None of our delivery folks is “selling papers” — a phrase that is often hurled, cynically and erroneously, in our direction. Seven Days is free. Advertising and reader donations support our operation but don’t influence our editorial content. And, generally speaking, the places that host our racks are happy to make the paper available to their customers. If you get a chance, please thank them. And if you can’t find Seven Days where you once did, ask a manager about it. Some grocery chains have started charging us exorbitant fees to put the paper in their stores. Their local employees have no say in the matter.
Seven Days produced a prop for Newsies — a four-page newsprint tabloid that showgoers picked up, along with the program, when entering the theater. On the cover, we imagined the article that Pulitzer’s fictional daughter, Katherine Plumber, a leading voice in the show, might have written about the newsboy strike for the New York Sun; in Newsies she uses the power of the pen, and an underground press, to get the word out.
Our chief proofreader, Angela Simpson, created a custom crossword for the faux newspaper. And deputy publisher Cathy Resmer made a great pitch for supporting Seven Days. As she noted, circulation and logistics director Matt Weiner “doesn’t have to encourage people to take a paper — in fact, sometimes people ask him for a copy before he has had a chance to put them on the rack.”
I got a kick watching people of all ages and stripes reading the Newsies tabloid before, during and after the show. On the way out of the theater, with Plumber’s song “Something to Believe In” still ringing in my ears, I saw one young girl pluck a discarded copy out of a recycling bin.
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This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2024.
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