the.com/newsprint
yesterday's truth, printed cheap, designed to yellow as fast as memory.
means The cheap, lightweight, slightly absorbent paper that newspapers are printed on.
from A plain compound that does exactly what it says: "news" plus "print," stitched together in the 19th century as the newspaper industry boomed and needed a name for the rough, low-cost paper churned out by the ton. "News" itself is delightfully literal — it began as the plural sense of "new things," the latest of what's new. "Print" comes through Old French "preinte," a pressed mark, from Latin "premere," to press — the same root that gives us "pressure" and the printing "press" itself. So newsprint is, at heart, "the new things, pressed onto cheap paper."
- made of
- mostly recycled paper and softwood pulp
- yellows fast
- acidic lignin browns it within days
- never archival
- meant to be tossed, not treasured
- fish wrapping
- its proverbial second life after reading
- thin by design
- weighs under half standard office paper
new york times — founded 1851, still prints ~370,000 copies daily on newsprint
wall street journal — prints ~2.8 million copies weekly on newsprint as of 2023
usa today — launched 1982, pioneered color newsprint in daily newspapers