What in hell's happened to newsrooms?

For once I'm not going to bitch about the disappearance of journalism in favour of burlesque. A friend's father died a few days ago. Knowing within a town or two where they lived, the day he died and that said towns had a newspaper each, it wasn't a big deal to check out the online editions, use some deduction, and find the obit my friend had written for her father.

The mind wanders, in this case back to the time when you knew you were in a newsroom, even taken there blindfold and with your ears stuffed. It was the smell of news that couldn't be concealed. No paper I knew had that smell like the Item.

The Lynn Daily Evening Item remains a pretty damn good small city paper, and its online edition reflects the standards. You knew there were standards, in the time that I hung around newsrooms pitching stories, by how they dealt with the smell of news.

There are three parts to the smell of news:

• Printer's ink: back when locals printed their own papers, the smell of the ink dominated everything else, unless one went to some lengths to hide it.
• Tobacco, fresh and stale. All reporters smoked; all editors smoked, and in those days real editors smoked cigars. If you didn't like it, you were welcome to find another job.
• There was usually more than a whiff of alcohol, generally bourbon. Since a real newsroom hadn't had a deep cleaning since about 1910, it was hard to say whether the smell dated from before Prohibition, or whether the staff was taking a shot with their bacon and eggs.

The paper in the next town up had an air conditioned newsroom, which they also kept clean. This may have given a professional impression, but it also had a slightly wussy suggestion about it, as if the staff weren't quite sure if they were reporters or--here it comes--media.

The Item had a real by-god newsroom, with the smell of news, and when the presses were running you could hear them and feel them in the newsroom. Even though this was already into the computer age, it took no stretch of the imagination to hear the clatter of manual typewriters.

It may be unfair to suggest that such an atmosphere made better news, but its persistence in that daily seems to have kept up a standard that most of today's media never knew existed. What's impressive that the online edition generally maintains the same values--even though pixels don't smell, as far as I know.

Here's to the rearguard of local daily and weekly papers: you still have something to teach "the media."