The newsboys' strike of 1899 was a U.S. youth-led campaign to force change in the way that Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers compensated their force of newsboys.

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At the turn of the century, newsboys were essential to newspaper distribution. While morning editions of the paper were often delivered directly to subscribers, the afternoon editions relied almost exclusively on newsboys to sell.

 

Most of the newsboys came from poor immigrant families and sold papers in the afternoons and evenings, after their school finished. They bought papers at 50¢ per hundred, and sold them at 1¢ each for a profit of half a cent per paper.

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The strike lasted two weeks, causing Pulitzer's New York World to decrease its circulation from 360,000 papers sold per day to 125,000.

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Although the price of papers was not lowered, the strike was successful in forcing the World and Journal to offer full buybacks to their sellers, thus increasing the amount of money that newsies received for their work.

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On July 24, 1899, the newsboys held a city-wide rally at Irving Hall sponsored by state senator Timothy D. Sullivan. An estimated five thousand boys from Manhattan attended the rally, along with two thousand boys from Brooklyn and several hundred from other areas of the city.

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On August 1, 1899, the World and Journal offered the newsboys a compromise: the price of a hundred papers would remain at 60¢, but they would buy back any unsold papers. This meant that boys who had trouble selling all their papers would not be forced to sell late into the night to avoid taking a loss for the day. The newsboys accepted this compromise, ending the strike and disbanding the union on August 2, 1899.

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