That delicious, woodsy, slightly acidic odor that flooded my memory with images of printing presses and the ratcheting clatter of teletype machines and the sight of a newsroom littered with cups of stale coffee and lazy clouds of swirling cigarette smoke.
Newspapers now have separate printing plants.
Teletype machines have long been gone. And smoking is a major no-no. But those feelings and memories, caught up in the smell of newsprint, were what I missed the most in the past five months. On Jan. 1, as an experiment, I canceled my newspaper subscriptions. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.