Speech
– 189 candidates;
– 121 passed – 64 per cent

The staging of a protest campaign by council tax payers against an unpopular decision by their local authority – and winning – is always good newspaper copy. And so it was in Oxdown after the town council decided to close its North Road branch library and review the future of four other branches, all of which had experienced a dramatic fall in usage.

People power resulted in the council changing its mind and allowing the North Road branch to remain open, staffed by volunteers on three days a week.

Surprisingly, a good number of candidates found this straightforward scenario difficult to handle and many of the stories produced were disappointing, especially for their lack of essential detail.

Some even failed to mention the rescue plan while others did so only superficially – no details of the voluntary arrangement, the new opening hours or when these would be introduced.

Others did not explain why North Road library had been selected for closure or give supporting figures for this, or the general decline in books borrowed. There was also widespread disregard of the influence of the internet on library services and the high number of people dropping by to use the free web service, while the number of books borrowed declined. As a result their stories lacked depth and would have left most readers wondering what all the fuss was about.

On this occasion the omissions could not be put down to poor shorthand note-taking as the bulk of the information was supplied in the candidates’ briefing notes – and intended for use.

Even when the ‘free’ facts and figures were included this was sometimes in an unstructured fashion, prompting one marker to comment, “Much of the important detail is here – but spread about like buckshot . . . a tough read.”

As usual, taking selective shorthand notes during an eight-minute speech, and then transcribing them accurately, was a recurring problem. Another marker said: “Quotes are so full of errors it’s impossible to take them seriously.”

Editors have every right to be concerned about the standard of their reporters’ copy if the careless and untidy work produced for this examination is repeated in newspaper offices. All too often it is a telephone call from an irate reader that alerts an editor to a problem, but how many readers simply suffer in silence when they are at the receiving end of inaccurate and incomplete reporting?

The Speech examination produced numerous examples of this – the wrong branch library saved; the chief librarian Desmond (or Dorothy) Parry described variously as Mr Desmond, Miss Perry and Mr Parr; wrong opening days and times for the library; running costs of £51,000 per branch inflated to £255,000; the £4 cost per book borrowed increased to £4,000; a protest petition signed by anywhere from 200 to 250,000 people.

Among the tactics used by opponents of the library closure was an unofficial read-in of the 400-year-old Oxdown Bible that had recently been discovered in the archives. This was a quirky little angle and it was pleasing to see that a good number of candidates were alert to this and used it effectively in their copy.

Indeed, the stories submitted were not all doom and gloom and only a handful failed to make any impression on the markers. As usual a select few stood out as being exceptionally good, written by talented young reporters with that special skill of marshalling all the facts and presenting them in a literate and interesting way. In between there were many workmanlike stories that were perfectly acceptable and well presented.

Overall, however, the message that emerged is that trainee reporters need to keep up their shorthand speeds and hone their note-taking skills, pay more attention to accuracy and detail, ensure that the basic who-what-why questions are answered, and make better use of background information they are provided with.

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