The first Newsgirls Lodging House website was started by Maria Hanton in March of 1999. The idea behind the lodging house was to have a place for girls to form a sort of community in which they could all write Newsies fan fiction and post it. These lodging houses work sort of like a real one would, where people who want to "stay" at the house will sign in and "live" there, that being that people will fill out a profile and post their stories on the website. Several years later, these lodging houses have ceased to be only places to write Newsies fan fiction, and have become simply historical writing circles and formed strong friendships and "nationalistic" attitudes toward houses. ((I love Harlem so much...)) The leaders of all houses are members of a greater New York Newsgirls' Union, which keeps things in the entire "Newsiverse" running smoothly.

Everyone who is a member of the house creates a character for him or herself and will write stories involving their character. All the members of the house are also allowed to use the other characters within their stories, as long as they are used with respect to the creator of the character, i.e. I can't write a story about me and Flash and say that Flash has purple eyes when Beth, who created the character of Flash, explicitly said that Flash has brown eyes. In order to make sure you keep this stuff right, our own Flash McAllen has created the Union Writers' Resource which contains all of the appearance standards and vital information about all of the newsgirls. Also, the Newsgirls' Master List keeps a giant listing of all the members of all the lodging houses.

Maria's idea of the original Lower Manhattan Newsgirls Lodging House was so popular that it has spawned lodging houses in all five bouroughs of New York as well as New Jersey. Additionally, the Newsiverse has begun expanding into not just lodging houses, but various businesses, gangs, and public service buildings.