Newsies - The World Will Know

Topic – Informal Power through Organizing
Movie Title- Newsies

Movie Summary- The movie takes place in 1899 in New York city. It details the journey of the exploited, poor child newspaper sellers, known as newsies. When Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst raise the distribution price one-tenth of a cent per paper the newsies organize a strike. With David as the brains of the new union, and Jack as the voice, the weak and oppressed found the strength to band together and challenge the powerful.

Concepts - This clip shows the formation of the “union.” It illustrates how a group of kids, with no formal power come together and lay out plans getting their demands heard and met. It shows the communication of the initial goal, as well as how the group plans to achieve their objectives. The “brains” of the operation feeds the message to the “voice” of the group who then interprets it and puts it in language that is commonly understood by the group. It illustrates how these two different roles within the group, brains and voice, work together to communicate to the larger group. With David being a newcomer to the newsies population he is not fully trusted yet, and doesn’t speak the same language, which is more slang in nature, as the rest of the group. Jack doesn’t have the knowledge to lead the movement, but he is considered the informal leader of the group. By working together they create a synergistic relationship in which they can accomplish their goal of forming a union to stand against the newspaper publishers. The clip ends with the entire large group of newsies being unified in their stand against Pulitzer and Hearst and declaring their goal of letting the world know they will not be taken advantage of.