The National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) was founded in 1951 as an organisation to oversee the training of journalists for the newspaper industry in the United Kingdom.
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Purpose
The NCTJ offers accreditation, recognised throughout the industry, for aspiring and junior print journalists. The accreditation consists of preliminary exams ('prelims'), which are undertaken either before the candidate begins work as a reporter or shortly afterwards, and the NCE, which is usually taken between 18 months and two years after beginning work on a newspaper. On completion of the NCE, the candidate is regarded as a fully-qualified senior reporter by the newspaper industry. As well as being the moderating body, the NCTJ offers training courses to candidates to help them pass both the NCTJ prelims and the NCE.
Prelims
Training for the prelims usually takes the form of a 22-week intensive course before employment starts, though there are various other options. These include a more relaxed 1-year course and distance learning or 'block release' for candidates who already have a reporting job and have been given paid leave by their employers to undertake the course.
NCE
Training for the NCE usually takes the form of a series of workshops to prepare candidates for the NCE exam, though some employers will not pay for these and send candidates into the exam without any preparation. This probably accounts for the relatively low pass rate, which is usually around 40 per cent each year.
The Oxdown Gazette
The Oxdown Gazette was a fictional newspaper used by the NCTJ as a setting for its regional and local journalism exam papers. Since the 1970s, trainee journalists would have to write reports on fires, floods, rail crashes and fatal accidents in the imaginary town of Oxdown. The idea was to replicate, as far as possible, the sense of local knowledge trainees would have if working for a real paper. In 2006 the NCTJ decided that it would no longer use Oxdown[1] - instead, a variety of locations and publications would feature on its exam papers. This did not go down well with some journalists and journalism lecturers, who had a sentimental attachment to the fictional town and launched a campaign to save it. [2] However, Oxdown lives on in a number of journalism training centres, sparing these institutions the chore of creating new fictional places every time they want to set a mock exam. Students training with Newsquest, for example, will find themselves back in the imaginary world of Robert's Park, Eastport and Midhampton when sitting refreshers for their NCTJ final examinations.
References and footnotes
- ^ Farewell to Oxdown. NCTJ web site (2006-09-26).
- ^ NCTJ’s Oxdown faces final disaster. Press Gazette (2006-06-23).
