It was the ultimate career fantasy for a certain fraction of American journalists.

At some time in their careers they wanted to live in Paris and work for the International Herald Tribune.

They had read it during their travels in Europe and it became a sort of newspaper of record for their vacations, fondly remembered for world news from an American point of view, as well as the stocks page, comic strips and baseball standings.

The newspaper exerted a mental and emotional tug on those Americans who read it, and especially so with U.S.-based journalists.

It was the newspaper Ernest Hemingway and The Lost Generation read in cafes or on travels to Spain. It was the American newspaper voice on the other side of the Atlantic, avidly read by European government ministers, interested in “the American perspective”.

It also brought a sort of cachet to its readers. “Oh, yes, I saw that story in the Herald Tribune.”

Those travelers happily, greedily bought it, often stopping at numerous news stands until they found a copy, then reading it from front to back while resting up from a day of sightseeing.

Some U.S. journalists made the big jump to the IHT, and spent decades there. I worked in the Paris newsroom in the summer of 2001 as an 11-week temp in a high-standards newsroom, and I can remember my last day in Paris that year, sitting on a bench near Invalides as the August sun inched toward the horizon.

The Paris Herald newspaper was founded in 1887 and was the European edition of the New York Herald. For the next 125 years it and its successors loomed large as The Goal for U.S. journalists with wanderlust.

That all is going to end this year.

The incremental demise of the International Herald Tribune, as it was known from 1967 and into 2013, will reach its perhaps logical conclusion in October, when the New York Times closes its Paris-based newsroom.

I feel badly for the 70 or so journalists will be unemployed in a few months — including, apparently, all those who worked on the editing and production side of the newspaper. (Reporters supposedly will be spared.)

The newspaper will still be available in Europe, but it will not be edited on the continent and it is said there will be no breaking news in the print edition.

I know several people who work there and have a passing acquaintance with several more who left the newspaper over the past decade, retiring or bought out in the incremental reduction of staff. Those still on staff  got the bad news this week.

It was a great gig, even when the novelty of living and working in Paris wore off, as it sometimes did for some. I know people who attended every opera and every concert for years … and then one day living with the seven or eight months of cold and gray got to them.

It was a very good newspaper. For most of its modern history its newsroom employees were mostly copy editors (gloriously pedantic) and designers. The IHT of the latter days had only a handful of writers; most reporting was done by employees of the New York Times or, until 2003, the Washington Post, and picked up by the IHT.

It was a destination newspaper, and not just because of its location. The IHT paid well and its employees got six weeks of vacation each year — plus the numerous French national holidays.

Employees hired through the French system got health insurance as well as French retirement benefits, which are quite generous, by U.S. standards.

Those things mattered, at the end of the line, but before that it was living in Paris, in France, in Europe, and five days a week going to the intellectual hothouse that was the IHT newsroom, that was so attractive.

It will be missed. The New York Times likes to think that readers will hardly notice that the newspaper is no longer edited in Paris, instead of London or New York or Hong Kong. They may be right.

Perhaps the IHT was doomed, like so many other print products that have taken mighty blows in the past decade. The rumors in France for more than a decade had been that the New York Times were going to close the Paris office.

I suppose the surprise here is that it took this long for the ax to fall.

It will be remembered fondly by the several generations of journalists who worked there, or aspired to, and not all of them American.

(For a bit of a sense of what it was like to work at the IHT, and the sort of people who might find themselves there … read The Imperfectionists, a novel about an American newspaper based in Rome (instead of Paris) by a former IHT copy editor, Tom Rachmann.)