Week Two Begins: Visit to Local Newspaper, "La Dépêche du Midi"

Students in Toulouse's French Language and Culture program returned to the classroom today from their first full weekend "en famille" in Toulouse. Among other activities, students spent their first weekend on program resting, traveling to the beach and to the mountains, camping, and attending the victory celebration of Toulouse's rugby team in the Place du Capitole.

We started the second week on program with a visit to the local newspaper, "La Dépêche du Midi". Students enjoyed a guided tour in French of the local, daily newspaper's office and production facilities, learning about the 150-year-old newspaper's history and its continued impact on the lives of the local population, 120,000 of whom ("plus ou moins", that is, "more or less") subscribe to or purchase a daily print copy of the newspaper. The paper's name derives from the daily "lettres de guerre" or "war letters" which were sent "quickly" from the front to Paris during the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s. The name stuck, and students learned today about how the bureau chiefs meet each morning to decide on what the hot topics of the day are and how many lines each article will be allotted in the production of the paper, which appears first on the internet and the next day in print. Students learned about original production methods, in which a typist painstakingly used a typewriter to enter each line onto a lead sheet, which became the "stéréotype" from which the pages were printed (hence the origin of the the word) en masse. Modern-day printing methods eliminated the use of lead sheets and replaced them with alumininum sheets and four base ink colors to produce approxiamately 120,000 copies per day, give or take, at 23 copies/second with today's technology.

The visit to "La Dépêche du Midi" gave students a chance to practice their listening and speaking skills in French as well as their social skills as they moved through a working space with 60 employees engaged in their craft, not to mention the opportunity to explore the possibility of exploring career opportunities in journalism, photography, or videography.

It was a great start to a second week, filled with learning both inside and outside of the classooms. Most importantly, students had the time to explore francophone culture, to form new friendships, and to continue to build the relationships they initated last week in their host families and among their fellow students and the French and American staff at CIEE.