Selling newspapers is a job I love. Changing times, news consumption create new challenges
“Have you signed up for the Springfield News-Leader this semester?”
The 35-year-old man had a stack of sample newspapers with 10 clipboards, furiously signing up every student walking by the student center, a nexus point where all sidewalks converged on campus. In the fall of 1998, every Missouri State student wanted a local newspaper subscription.
I joined the bandwagon and filled out the paperwork. I paid $10 for the discounted subscription and walked to class. I had already signed up for the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, so I might as well get local news.
That day was the start of my love affair with local news and newspaper subscription sales. Had I known that the salesman earned over $1,000 that day signing up more than 100 students, I would have started my eventual newspaper kiosk sales career sooner.
Ten years later, I was an unemployed college graduate with a journalism degree. Nobody was hiring in 2008. I was surviving on temp work while writing a weekly political column in the News-Leader, hoping it would lead to a paying job.
My then-wife, Jill, bought a yearly subscription for my birthday from a sales rep at a nearby Walgreens for only $120 a year. I was buying the newspaper every Tuesday to have a copy of my column. It made sense to have it delivered for the same price. She also received a $20 Walgreens gift card.
I noticed a job listing in the classifieds for a kiosk sales position. The guy who signed up my Jill was terminated for drinking alcohol at the kiosk. I applied and started selling three days later.
At the end of the first week, I felt like a failure. I only sold 30 subscriptions, mostly because I was working a location in a low income area, where few people had money. I thought for sure I was going to be terminated.
Selling 30 new starts in a week was actually good in a small market like Springfield. By my third week, I had broken the local record for most starts in a week, selling over 100 new subscriptions. By the end of the year, I wrote the second most orders in the entire company, Leading Prospect Group.
Over the next 15 years, I left LPG, started my own kiosk sales company, moved to Utah and eventually Washington. I’ve sold subscriptions in about half of the United States, working for newspapers big and small. I even signed up then-Gov. Rick Scott of Florida for the Wall Street Journal.
It pains me to see so many newspaper chains are now giving up on actively seeking new customers, especially through kiosk starts at storefront and event promotions. Before the pandemic, most daily newspapers in the country had a kiosk sales team or someone who sold periodically for the publication.
In 2023, most daily newspapers do not have kiosk sales reps. McClatchy ended sales rep promotions after their bankruptcy in 2020. Gannett (which includes the Springfield News-Leader) ended kiosk promotions around 2021. This summer, Lee Enterprises (which includes the St Louis Post-Dispatch) stopped doing kiosk sales after switching most of their print publications to three days a week.
With so few jobs available for newspaper kiosk sales reps, a once competitive industry has now become a fraternity of mostly single, middle-aged or older, male sales reps who travel across the country looking for work.
Darrel Thompson is likely the last newspaper kiosk sales rep in Utah. The 86-year old has been doing this job for over 25 years, after retiring from selling business forms in the late 1990s. Thompson mostly sells for the Ogden Standard-Examiner and the Provo Daily Herald, which are both owned by Ogden Publications of West Virginia. His pay is currently lower than what he earned 20 years ago. Combined with Social Security, he’s able to pay his bills.
Like a lot of kiosk sales reps, I did not have a permanent address for most of the last three years. With so many changes in the industry and the pandemic, I didn’t want to sign a long-term lease. I lived in motels and Airbnb locations.
Now that I’m remarried, we decided to settle down and get an apartment in Lynnwood, Washinton. Thankfully, we get to use our new home about five months out of the year while doing events north of Seattle throughout the summer. The rest of the year, we split our time between Alaska, Hawaii, and other parts of Washington.
Every year, this job gets more difficult. Subscription prices increase, even though the number of printed days and content decreases. Older customers either die of old age or stop taking the newspaper because they don’t want to wait for it to arrive in the mail and don’t want to learn how to use their online subscription. Younger people don’t understand why they have to pay to read online content.
That’s not the worst part. Newspaper kiosk sales reps are being verbally harassed and threatened by far right extremists at events. Thanks to my military training, I can handle my own if someone wants to get physical. I worry about others, especially my wife, who may not be able to defend herself from political violence.
My hope is that I can finish out this decade doing kiosk sales. At age 55, I will be old enough to qualify for a low-priced mobile home in a senior park. Otherwise, we will have to move to the Midwest, where homes are a lot cheaper.
I’m not writing this seeking sympathy. I chose this career and am making it work the best way possible. My hope is that people will read this and have a better understanding of what it’s like being a newspaper kiosk sales rep.
Ryan Cooper runs a newspaper kiosk sales team that works in multiple states for multiple publications.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Changing times, news consumption make newspaper sales challenging
