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It’s Good to Talk Roundabout Talking News The Roundabout Talking News is a volunteerrun registered charity which has provided a free weekly recording to the visually impaired since 1978. A team of 50 volunteers are involved in the service, providing about 150 listeners a 30 minute reading with the best of the news headlines from the West Sussex County Times, as well as the obituaries and key entertainment listings. A further half an hour is filled with a variety of informative and occasionally humorous articles, sourced by the volunteers from magazines, specialist publications and the internet. For many years, the recordings were made onto cassette tapes, but in recent times listeners have been given the news on memory sticks. The sticks are played on easy to use stereos given out free of charge. Chairman John Dean said: “We’re limited to
4,000 words as that is the maximum we can fit on to the one hour cassettes, which a few listeners still use. “When we have completely switched over to memory sticks it will be more open-ended, but still, we don’t want to drown them in news! There is very little sport as most of the listeners are not interested in it. Some are, but you can’t do bespoke recordings. We keep the articles quite short and snappy by editing them down to about 250 words per story. “The West Sussex County Times has been good to us over the years. They agreed to our request to use their articles. We have always met up on a Thursday night and did think about moving back another day when the West Sussex County Times started publishing on a Thursday rather than a Friday, but we have 50 volunteers working on this and so the Thursday routine is well established.”
There are several teams involved in the production of the Roundabout Talking News every Thursday. Firstly, a Preparation Team arrives at about 4.30pm to sort the postal wallets returned from listeners which contain either tape cassettes or memory sticks. Meanwhile, an Editing Team selects articles from the newspaper and edits them down before the Readers digitally record the news in the studio. The Magazine Team comes in shortly after 6pm to record their articles. Sound Technicians then create master copies of the recordings on cassette tape and on memory stick. The Fast Copying Team arrive the following morning and use fast copying machines to copy the recordings on to cassette tapes and memory sticks, before placing them all into the postal wallets. We spoke to some of the volunteers about the service they provide...
If you know someone who is registered blind or partially sighted and would like to know more about Roundabout Talking News, visit www.roundabouttalkingnews.co.uk or call Secretary Martyn Field on 01403 891306 or Chairman Jon Dean on 01403 266924.