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News Interview – 231 candidates; 120 passed – 52%

Once again, one is forced to conclude that many trainees are churning out stories week after week without anyone questioning their news sense.

The springboard for this story was an attack on a gay man by two youths in Oxdown town centre. But it was far from being the complete story.

Had the right questions been asked, some comments by a spokesman for the gays in the brief given to reporters before their interview should have led to a strong denial of “institutional prejudice” by the interviewee, a police superintendent.

In addition, the interviewee was able to give details of the four earlier attacks that had been carried out on homosexuals in the town centre and to suggest that the culprits were conducting a hate campaign against gays.

Those two phrases – “prejudice” and “hate campaign” – had headline potential. Why, then, did so many trainees bury them in their stories? Details of the latest attack had to be given, but the story was bigger than that one incident.

Some trainees – and not necessarily those from the daily newspapers – got it right. They showed an appreciation of the full news value of this story and wrote it with the headline in mind. So why did the others underplay – or in a few cases completely miss – those key elements?

Is their copy on their newspapers no longer being carefully scrutinised by their seniors? Are they not being asked to rewrite their stories if they bury the headline angles? These are questions that must be asked.

Inevitably, the quality of news writing varied enormously, some candidates displaying much more discipline or flair than others.

A number of candidates constructed their intros in a way that misleadingly suggested the attacks had been carried out by the police. There was frequent use of the word “homophobic”, sometimes in a way that clouded the meaning or weakened the impact.

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