General News
1 July, 2026
An exciting experience
WESTERN District Newspapers hosted an enthusiastic work experience student from Cobden Tech, who assisted in the printing press room and learnt all about the newspaper making process last week.
Year 10 student Jeromy Leeson said a staff member at school suggested the press room at Western District Newspapers to try his hand at work experience and he jumped onboard the idea.
“I’m really into technology,” he said.
“I’ve learnt that the ink is mineral based and how the machines work so that was interesting.
“I didn’t think that they would print the ink separate but it makes sense now.
“I’ve enjoyed my time here this week.
“It’s interesting and slow paced until the printing part, but it’s not too bad.”
Jeromy said his favourite subjects at school were math and digitech, but he would be unable to complete digitech next semester due to his participating in Year 11 VCE general maths and business.
“When I was looking for work experience, I was more leaning towards the technological side of things,” he said.
“When they mentioned learning how the machine works, I thought that would suit me and I was interested.
“I would recommend other Year 10 work experience students try this out – it’s a good place, Chris (Esh) was nice, and it’s not too hard to learn.
“I had fun.”
One of the highlights of Jeromy’s experience was learning specifically how the ink works on the paper, which was a more complicated process than he initially thought.
“Pretty much, I thought they had ink rollers, but ones that change automatically, but apparently not,” Jeromy said.
“Apparently, they couldn’t do that due to the ink sticking to the page, so I learnt they had to go through a whole process, getting the plate and putting it through a light beaming machine to create patterns, so the ink would stick to the same parts, then we had to attach them.
“Interesting thing is they had rollers for the water – I never knew that, I thought ink just went straight onto the page.
“They have water on the roller and water on the plate and parts that don’t have water sticking to them, ink gets put on and it’s transferred to the paper.
“I wasn’t expecting the whole printing process to take a long time, I was expecting it to take longer, but the time setting up didn’t take as long as I thought.”
Read More: Cobden