Producing a newspaper in the 19th century was a labour-intensive undertaking. Today’s automated technology was still a long way off and each line of text had to be set by hand. We can see here some corrections made to ad text from one week to the next , . Newsgathering was quite different in these days as well, as wire services were still their infancy. News editors relied as much on the postal system as on new inventions like telephone and telegraph .

The front page of Le Progrès illustrates the changes the newspaper went through. At first, page one consisted entirely of ads , . The paper had to show advertisers that it was able to deliver the goods to the readers. But little by little, news started to appear on the front page , , , . The paper’s format changed many times over the years. In some years the size was reduced to that of a tabloid ; in other periods it was a full-sized broadsheet . Illustrated news stories appeared on the front page for the first time in 1894: images of the China-Japan conflict gave Le Progrès’s readers a taste of something exotic , . For the most part, Le Progrès ran to four pages; some years it increased to eight and even sixteen pages. But an increase in volume rarely signalled an increase in quality: the thicker the paper, the more filler and reprints took up the available space. Twenty years after its beginnings, Le Progrès had resumed covering the front page in ads .

In the early years, the Pacaud brothers had offices in Windsor and Detroit . The newspaper was printed on the American side of the border in order to take advantage of cheaper postal rates available there . This occasionally led to problems for a French newspaper . Furthermore, the practice involved tricky legal issues. For mailing purposes, Le Progrès claimed to be an American paper, but for when it came to paying custom duties, it proclaimed itself a Canadian publication. Enemies of Le Progrès applied pressure to various government departments and managed to end this practice in 1886 . Henceforth, the paper would be printed in Windsor, where it would occupy many premises over the years , , .

The paper survived on two main revenue sources : subscriptions and advertising. When it first began, Le Progrès cost a dollar fifty per year; later the price dropped to a dollar. It employed what we would nowadays call negative billing. The paper was sent out to francophone families throughout the area; those who failed to return it within a specified time were automatically considered subscribers . The power of the press was then utilized to publicly humiliate those who refused to pay . Le Progrès also used more conventional means like coupons and contests to attract readers. Judging by the response, a contest to find “the most beautiful French-Canadian girl of the county” must have sold a lot of papers in 1897-98 , , , . As well, all the local newspapers ran door-to-door campaigns to sell subscriptions. In one instance, Le Progrès makes fun of one of its competitors, Dr. Casgrain, who seems to run into quite a bit of resistance in Pointe-aux-Roches in the course of his campaign to sell subscriptions to his paper, Le Cultivateur. The two papers were obviously fighting over the same pool of readers , .

But selling advertising remained the principle source of revenue for Le Progrès. Judging by the number of ads that filled the pages of their newspaper, the Pacaud brothers appear to have been quite successful in this endeavour. Advertising rates from 1884 may seem insignificant compared to today’s prices, but at the time they no doubt generated considerable sums of money . The rates advertisers were willing to pay went up as circulation increased; circulation numbers were obviously important to set these rates. It appears the Pacaud brothers were not adverse to inflating these numbers somewhat, as is reported in Le Courrier, one of Le Progrès’s main competitors .

Le Progrès nevertheless overcame this and many other setbacks. The Pacaud brothers understood the newspaper game very well and for more than thirty years managed to stay on top of the Windsor scene.