Former Dispatcher staff member publishes new history of America’s news criers

DiGirolamo, Vincent. Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 698 pp. $36.95. (Hardcover)

Vincent DiGirolamo, former Dispatcher staff writer turned labor historian, published his first book, Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys. DiGirolamo wrote for the Dispatcher in the 1980s and went on to get his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He is currently a member of the History Department at Baruch College of the City University of New York. His book received almost every scholarly book award in American history including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Philip Taft Labor History Award.

Crying the News tells the American story from the perspective of newsies—newsboys and (on rare occasion) girls. The book is a cultural and labor history that brings to life the lives of these child workers, most of whom were the children of immigrants and were between the ages of six and sixteen, who sold and delivered newspapers in cities and towns across the United States. Drawing on his experience as a labor journalist, DiGirolamo skillfully uses stories about individuals to illustrate topics, including racism, sexism, crime and the daily living and working conditions of newsies.

The book explores their role in the economy and as cultural symbols. It argues that the newspaper industry had a formative influence on working-class youth that is important to our understanding of American childhood, labor, journalism, and capitalism.

Newsies were framed as “little entrepreneurs” and independent contractors by the newspaper industry in order to deny them rights as workers and obscure their exploitation by employers—a situation familiar to today’s ride share and food delivery drivers in the so-called new “gig economy.” Despite being the foundation upon which America’s modern newspaper industry was built, their earnings remained marginal even as the newspaper industry grew and thrived with technological advances in production.

Newsies were not just passive victims of an exploitative industry. They frequently organized for their own benefit through unions such Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and, in the mid-1930s, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). DiGirolamo argues that laws regulating child street labor, however, limited in their impact, were products of children’s collective action as much as the efforts of Progressive-era reformers.

This book will be of great interest to anyone who appreciates labor studies, social and cultural history, and labor history, and the history of mass media and journalism.