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