Website? Century-old French newspaper seeks new Linotype instead
(Artdaily.org)

Jenny Braconnier sits at a hulking grey machine, amid the fumes of molten lead, swiftly typing out the news from northeast France on a strange-looking keyboard that produces lines of metal type. Beside her is a smartphone, one of the few nods to modernity in the deliberately retro newsroom of Le Democrate de l`Aisne. Braconnier, 21, and four young colleagues have mastered a 1970s Linotype machine for the weekly newspaper which covers an area near Belgium that proudly sticks with a technology most papers abandoned decades ago. The four-page broadsheet, which bills itself `100 percent lead, zero percent web`, covers the local farming scene along with more timely concerns like trends in New Year`s greeting cards or the tally of anti-fraud operations carried out in the area last year. `It`s a place where we do whatever it takes,` said