One of the speakers at the 'Meet the Press' event was Pam Cork, whose father Bob Hobson was the owner and editor of Bellingen's Courier-Sun from 1951 to 1985.

The other was Michael English, whose family still produces the Don Dorrigo Gazette the same way its founders, Reg and Herb Vincent, did in 1910: setting the news in hot lead on a vintage Intertype machine and printing it on a Heidelberg Zylinder Automat press.

Pam said that in the days when the two papers used similar technology, they helped each other out if it malfunctioned, and to illustrate this she told a story she'd heard from John Rose, who was an apprentice at the Courier-Sun from 1948.

"The managing editor of the Gazette had a problem with his letterpress machine, so after contacting the Courier-Sun, he put the plates ready for printing in his trailer.

"By the time he reached Bellingen on the rough road, all the type had fallen out and was mixed up and they spent hours reassembling it before they could print the paper.

"If you know anything about typesetting this was a major task as it's all in individual lines of column width and is a mirror image of the print."

Pam's father spent his entire working life at the Courier-Sun, from cadet journalist to editor, purchasing the paper with the help of local businesses when the previous owner, Alex Gilchrist, moved to Coffs Harbour.

She retains fond memories of the old days when the paper was typeset and printed locally.

"The smell of the print to me is just home and the sounds of the machines going are fascinating," she said.

Pam could relive those days by heading up the hill to Dorrigo on a Friday or Monday morning, when Michael and his wife Jade are running the press to make 1000 copies of the eight-page Don Dorrigo Gazette.

The paper has been published faithfully every Wednesday since 1910, regardless of wars, floods, family illnesses or equipment malfunction.

Michael's father John ran it for 50 years before him, never missing an issue, but Michael and Jade broke with tradition by taking a week off for their honeymoon.

At the 'Meet the Press' event, Michael spoke about their stressful time around Easter of last year when the press stopped inking the pages properly.

It crippled their production process for weeks while they were waiting for replacement parts, but they still got the paper out.

The content is nearly all contributed, and these days most of it arrives via email, but every story has to be manually entered by Michael on the Intertype keyboard before being printed and proofread by Jade.

It's a lot of work.

"Some days you love it, some days you hate it," Michael said.

One of the 27 attendees at 'Meet the Press' was Bill Aitchison, who now lives in Urunga but trained as a typesetter for papers in Sydney many years ago.

Bill said he'd been out of the game for over 30 years, but Michael took note of his contact details, just in case.