Since you are already reading it, you know the quiet pleasure of leafing through your weekly. Enjoy photos of foreign or familiar landscapes, faces known or to know. Discover elsewhere where the tabloid brings you closer to the telescope, or the region corner that it enlarges you under the microscope. Find the deals, the film to see at local cinemas, social activities, read the reviews … Without buttons to press or screen to “suck”, sail on the pages with signatures that have succeeded during of the almost eighty years of L’Écho .
Patient work reinvented each time in premises where a whole daily orchestra comes alive. Telephone operators, soprano voices from the newspaper, welcoming guests, visitors, questions, complaints and classified ads. Canvassers, drums of advertising supports for regular editions and special notebooks, preparing in advance the major themes of the year. Soloists or anonymous journalists, on the lookout for the news, once a phone in the palm of the shoulder and now a wireless and screen user, with a small keyboard, almost piano, instead of the heavyweight allegro typist. Trumpet photographers of group portraits and trombones of news items, running to the emergency room and witnessing emotions. Head of the desk and scores, punctuating the images, texts and titles. Corrective, balancing the sound to avoid false notes, twice rereading everything rather than one. Model maker, first violin, playing the puzzle of the pages where to assemble content and publicity, up to the front page, sometimes waiting for the “scoop” or the stars who will set the tone for the whole symphony. And the young trades, synthesizers, that modern technology imposes on newspapers now, graphic designers and web page technicians completing the site and transferring new arrivals there after the deadline for the printed copy. Then the reception of the copies, their distribution at the doors and in the publisacs …
And that’s without mentioning the instrumentalists occasionally welcomed at the concert. Passers-by asked for a short opinion on a topical subject. Readers whose pros and cons are added to the news, to report a fact or encourage certain behaviors. Commentators invited to L’Écho (or Mirabel ) to deal with current affairs, as I enjoy doing, after those I have not known, but also some more recent ones. François Varin, from the Historical Society. Mgr Paul Labelle, whose chronicles are available at the Archives Center. Charles Michaud, the eclectic. Robert Soulières, the humorist. Anne-Marie Cadieux, the meticulous. Claude Rochon, the passionate …
Long manufactured by the largest team in the journalism of Jerome, first sold, then donated, L’Écho is at a time when the survival of printed newspapers is uncertain, but its 80 years show no fatigue , and it ages in beautiful harmony.
