National Council For The Training of Journalists - The Oxdown Gazette

The Oxdown Gazette

The Oxdown Gazette was a fictional newspaper used by the NCTJ as a setting for its 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 — 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.

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 exams.