About Us

There was a Talking Newspaper gap in the Scottish Borders so the idea of starting up a local service was born in the early 1990s. The recorded newspapers would be made available free to anyone who, for whatever reason, could not either hold or read a newspaper.

Having put together a small committee, found some volunteers and a recording engineer (key person), the next task was to find suitable recording equipment, space and some listeners!

We worked in John and Ishbel Coy's attic (he was the recording engineer – with equipment - and Ishbel was our first treasurer) and sent our master tape to Brian West, key figure in TN world in Edinburgh, to duplicate. We did our own duplicating after the gift of two duplicating machines from Yorkshire (which we drove down to collect) in July 1992. We went out fortnightly from 20 March 1992 until issue 25 of 5 March 1993 when we started to produce a weekly tape.

News items are chosen from two of our local weekly newspapers, the Southern Reporter and Berwickshire News.
Magazine tapes: As a result of a 4 week gap in tapes in 1992 over Christmas and the New Year, a Magazine Tape was organised. Subsequently a summer tape was added. In 2000 a Magazine Committee was set up and the current commitment is to a minimum of four tapes per annum: these may include any material suitable for listeners, especially if made or partly made by them, and at least two in-house tapes. Often we include articles from Border Life, a quarterly magazine which reflects life in the Scottish Borders.

As a form of quality assurance there is always at least one listener on our committee who provides valuable feedback.
To improve the quality of the output we now record digitally and as audio tapes become more difficult to source and cassette tape decks less popular, we provide the newspaper on data sticks which can be played either through a computer or special players (which we also provide). We continue to provide tapes to those listeners who prefer this medium.

Please go to our Listen page and hear what we do and if you would like to receive our weekly recording (or just our quarterly magazine) please contact our office by post or phone or email. Although it isn’t manned every day, you can leave a message and someone will get back to you.

As an independent charity, we rely totally on donations to keep the service going so if you’d like to help us, please go to our Donations page.

If you are interested in volunteering in any way, please go to the Volunteering page.

You can download our constitution from HERE.

Finally, thank you for visiting our website and showing your interest in our work.

Borders Talking Newspaper Association
Registered Scottish Charity No. SC020192