Jobs Going Extinct: My Morning Newspaper Deliveryman

"I sell the morning paper, sir, my name is Jimmy Brown.
Everybody knows that I'm the newsboy of the town."
Written by Bill Monroe, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy," 1959, performed by Flatt & Scruggs: You can listen to them by clicking on this link.

I thought of this old timey bluegrass music song while sitting at my laptop working this morning. I'm up way before the roosters, and I can hear the guy driving around the streets in my still and quiet neighborhood. The distinctive "plops" I hear come from his pitching out the bundled newspapers into my and my fellow subscribers' driveways as he passes by us. He must have a bazooka of a throwing arm by now. He's not exactly like Jimmy Brown the newsboy in the Bill Monroe song because my delivery guy drives a car and covers a much longer route.

Fewer and fewer of us troglodytes are getting the dead trees version of the newspaper. I strongly suspect our newspaper will eventually discontinue offering their product in the paper version. It's cheaper going digital, and saving money is the name of the profitable game nowadays. The guy who does the pre-dawn deliveries will be out of a job. I'll probably miss reading the Sports section on old-fashion paper even if I sell my novels and short story collections as e-books.

I'm thinking I might do a series of blog posts on the different jobs out there that seem to be going the way of the passenger pigeon and dinosaur. Maybe newer technologies emerge and displace such workers as the newspaper deliveryman I hear every morning driving around distributing his wares. Perhaps you can think of the jobs you've noticed slipping away from the scene. Drop me a comment, if you will.