Oxdown Gazette

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The Oxdown Gazette was a fictional newspaper used by the National Council for the Training of Journalists for its regional and local journalism exams. Since the1970s, 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.

Oxdown was part of Oxshire. Several exam papers focused on crime committed in the now infamous Riverside Estate, which made places like Hackney, Peckham and the Gorbals seem like paradise. The Oxdown Gazette produced such stories like a crooked santa preying on the old people of Oxdown, a theft with one robber being fat the other called Alan and parking problems at the towns racecourse.

In 2006 the NCTJ decided that it would no longer use Oxdown. Instead, a variety of locations and publications would feature in its exam papers. The decision was not well received by some journalists and lecturers who had a sentimental attachment to the fictional town and launched a campaign to save it^[1].