Our WSTN service depends on volunteers

The whole service is staffed by volunteers and organised by a small committee.

Two of our most regular volunteers, pictured below, at the WSTN's volunteering stand in the Darwin Centre, Shrewsbury: John Wilson, Sports Editor and Angie Davies, Mail Co-ordinator. 

In total there are around 100 people involved, some of whom got together for an informal pub lunch, pictured below. 

Some volunteers work on a very regular basis and some at infrequent intervals - within our geographical area spanning Whitchurch to Ludlow and from east of Shrewsbury to the Welsh border.

Some of the vital roles are shown below and if you are interested in finding out more, with a view to becoming involved, please leave a message on our answerphone 01743 364 726.

Editing

This entails collecting the 60 or so stories needed for each issue. When we started the service in 1976 we literally cut stories from the inkprint papers.  But now the stories are generally cut and pasted from the webpages of the publications and then printed up in a 12pt font for ease of reading.

The picture below shows some of the founder team scanning the papers in May 1976 prior to the first issue (which then covered the whole county).

Presenting, reading and recording

The duty editor's selected stories are passed to the duty presenter for incorporation with the pre-recorded features in the running order. Each Wednesday evening the presenter, two readers and a technical operator meet in our underground studio, shown below, and make an hour-long digital recording on computer. That is the master of that week's West Shropshire Talking Newspaper.

Copying digital memory sticks

Another small team use high speed digital cloning units to create (and quality check) the required number of USB memory sticks. (picture shows our former cassette production in progress).

Unpacking returns

While this is underway other volunteers are unpacking the week's incoming postal pouches and putting the returned memory sticks ready for re-recording.

Membership and despatch

The mailing list is organised by computer with the aid of bar-coded address labels which are scanned to determine the subsequent despatch before packing ready for collection by Royal Mail. By this time on Thursdays the editing process for the following issue has already begun.

There are also other reporting and admin roles as well as periodic street collection duties within the West Shropshire Talking Newspaper.

If you think you can help with any of these roles please get in touch on our answerphone, 01743 364 726