Carwyn Jones, Independently Funded News Consortium and the Labour Leadership

One day after plans for independently funded news consortiums in Wales were dropped by the coalition government, First Minister Carwyn Jones decided to pay a visit to the Cardiff School of Journalism.

Unfortunately he chose to visit one week after the broadcast postgraduate diploma course had finished, which meant that there were almost no students to greet him or show him how to work a TV studio.

Still in a question and answer session he did answer some tricky questions.
Listen!

Anger at Welsh Media

Carwyn expressed frustration that the independently funded news consortium had been dropped. When asked about ITV he said that he was seriously concerned about the future of news on commercial networks.

He didn’t think that the proposal for city TV stations to provide news would work, especially considering that in his words the Manchester station was “failing”.

He admitted that he had little confidence in commercial interests to maintain a high standard of news output, with concerns that if ITV were ever taken over local news would be removed from programming.

Labour Leadership

He refused to reveal who he would support in the Labour Leadership contest because he needed to maintain a professional relationship with whoever came to power.

In the Q&A session he felt that the sheer number of candidates for Labour Leader meant that it would be a diverse and interesting race.

However in a later radio interview with me he acknowledged that the Labour party needs to do more to promote people of diversity to positions of leadership.

Referendum

Throughout his meeting with students Carwyn laid out his criticisms of the current legislative competence order system.

He acknowledged that he will lead a Yes campaign in a referendum on further powers because under the current system “everything had to be done twice” which means that it took a long time and cost a lot of money.

Finally cuts

Newspaper students pressed the First Minister to reveal details of where cuts will be made in public spending.

Carwyn said that his focus was to protect schools and hospitals but that everything else was scheduled for review. When pushed further he revealed that there would be cuts to the Arts budget, but that this was more of a token cut, since this area of expenditure is very small.

Cuts will be announced by the end of the summer, with plans for a referendum on devolution promised for spring of next year.

My first general election

At approximately 5 o’clock in the morning the day after the general election.

Reporter “So how many Labour seats do we have?”

Me “Three Labour, three Lib dem and one Green at the moment. The rest are all Conservative.”

Long pause

Reporter “No really what are the figures?”

Me” Really! Those are the figures, we are just waiting for two more seats to come in and they are not due till after midday!”

Reporter “wow”

For regular readers to this blog I am sorry for not posting more frequently, but as you are probably aware there has been a general election going on!

As a broadcaster I have an obligation to be impartial on all things political, and although blogs are supposed to be about opinions I was so overwhelmed with all the recent media madness that I haven’t had time to blog.

BJTC Placements

For the past month I have simultaneously been revising for exams, preparing my final portfolio and working for the BBC and ITV.

While at BBC South Today I had two packages make to air and provided pictures/ interviews for every day of my placement. At ITV Wales I took on more of a behind the scenes role helping with planning, the ITV Welsh Leaders Debate and their political programme the Sharp End.

My General Election

For the election night I was working back down in Southampton, starting at 11:00 at night and finishing about 10:00 the next day. My role was to run around the newsroom updating the graphics team on the results of more than 50 constituencies across the South. Along with another elections helper, I updated the constituency board and passed on information from the News Org to Online and other reporters on the ground. Oh and check out Peter Henley’s blog for a funny photo of Jeremy Vines Election night, and a breakdown of all the constituencies I was monitoring.

It was a really exciting night to be working in media, although at 4 in the morning it’s hard to drum up lots of enthusiasm. Still I was really glad to be working because it has meant that I can say I followed the polls through the night into a hung parliament. It was also the night that TV really showed how powerful a force it now is in British Democracy. Rory Cellen Jones says that this has not been an online election, it has been a TV election and I think he is right. I doubt anyone would have told you this time last year that the Liberal Democrats would be talking to the Conservatives about forming a government, something which really came about because of the leadership debates.

Although Facebook and Twitter did play a key role in engaging with younger voters it was the leaders debates which really galvanised the campaigns. I have always been interested in politics but I have never been able to discuss it with 95% of my friends without them falling asleep! On all three leaders debate nights I had friends I had known for years texting me or IMing me about the parties policies, the scariness of Gordon Browns smile or Cameron’s possible Botox.

So what next?

Like the rest of the world I honestly have no idea, but what I do know is that most journalists I speak to would not want another general election in a few months time. The election is great for TV but it also takes over news agendas, dominating headlines and limiting broadcasters. Any story we want to cover has to be rigorously checked for any political slant, and the need to show all candidates/ possible party slogans eats up time in short packages.

The party political broadcasts also eat into local news bulletins, causing audiences to switch off and limiting the creativity of news rooms which suddenly find they only have 20 minutes to fit in local news stories, of which 10 minutes is taken by election material.

To be clear this is no criticism of any of the newsrooms I have been in, but ultimately another general election in a few months is not an exciting prospect for most to the journalists I know. However a hung parliament is a juicy news agenda. TV has awakened a new interest in politics over the past 6 weeks, the key in my view is to maintain that interest, while not being dominated by it. How that happens, I just don’t know?

Miss University GB- Radio package

This package was broadcast as part of a Wales at One lunchtime programme, aimed at a BBC Local Radio audience based in Cardiff.

Pres: Women from across the uk including nine people from Wales, gathered in Cardiff last night to take part in the Miss University GB final.

But the beauty pageant is facing strong criticism

The nation union of students staged a protest at Oceana night club against the pageant.

Our reporter Hannah Green went along to the protest, to find out why the pageant is causing such controversy.

Beauty Package

Will good journalism be the first casualty of the digital revolution in media?

This article was submitted as part of my broadcast journalism postgraduate diploma. It is written as a print article so does not contain hyper links. The speakers quoted participated in a series of lectures called Reporters and Reported, which looked at editorial descisions and theories within journalism.

On the 18^th January 2010 the health section of the BBC website announced that blonde women have a competitive edge over other women in business. On the 19^th January 2010 the story was amended; “This story has been revised after Dr Sell (the author of the research on which this story is based) made clear to the BBC that his research had set out to test the link between temperament and attractiveness, rather than hair colour”. I am not a journalist who covers a health patch, but after doing some basic checks I can see the methodology of this research is clearly flawed. While I would love to think that my blonde hair will make me a more competitive journalist, I don’t believe this story deserves space in the health section of the BBC website.

The story reads like a press release which a journalist has re-copied without reading the research or checking the facts. In 2009 the BBC website published stories which claimed that blonde women can improve Latvia’s economy, that spies are more likely to be blondes, and that more women are blondes because of the recession. None of these stories were published in the also in the news section of the website. I would relish the chance to be a spy, but what worries me is that trained journalists believe that these stories are of sufficient weight and merit to deserve a place on the BBC website. I think they are classic examples of the ‘churn it out’ culture, which has now been accepted as the norm. However I don’t believe that churnalism is something that has developed as a result of a digital revolution in the media.

Research by Cardiff University in 2006, showed that print journalists now produce an average of three times as much copy as they did twenty years ago. The research also noted an increasing dominance of wire stories and press releases with; “60% of press articles and 34% of broadcast stories coming wholly or mainly from these ‘pre-packed media’ sources.” Competition from user generated content and decreasing newspaper sales, has lead many industry insiders to blame the digital revolution for the destruction of good journalism. As Rob Andrew from Paid Content UK states; “good journalism is in danger of becoming a charity case… as proliferation of content and the open source ideas of the internet give media organisations big problems.” I disagree because I think that rather than being a casualty, media organisations and journalists are leaders of the digital revolution. Both continue to push the boundaries of technology to tell better stories and to engage with their audiences. The internet has created increased competition for traditional media and does raise significant questions about how we finance our future careers as journalists. But I don’t think it is to blame for the demise of good journalism, instead I think it highlights the bad practices which have developed in our industry.

The digital revolution in media does mean that incidents of bad journalism are far harder to hide. In an age where journalists are trying to fight off increasing competition from bloggers, the large number of poorly researched stories in newspapers, broadcasts and magazines continue to undermine public faith in our industry.  From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21^st Century, by the BBC Trust reports; “just as powerful search engines prevent personal indiscretions or embarrassments sliding into oblivion, so the age of the podcast is ensuring that every impartiality decision taken in the heat of the daily broadcasting battle is preserved in the present tense- for ever.” Thanks to the digital revolution, the audience is now able to react and respond instantly to examples of poor quality journalism. Social networking websites, forums and comments allow journalists to engage with their audience on a very intimate level.

Every social media website has its own set of rules, which are developed by the community which uses them. Professor Ian Hargreaves the current Director of Communications at the Foreign Office says “the licence to operate in a community is defined by the community’s values” and that a good journalist understands the values and ideas of the community in which they are operating. Journalists who use social networking websites to engage with their audience, fail when they forget that their discussions are public and accountable to the rules of the community. The Deputy Managing Director of BBC Magazines Nicholas Brett believes that; “In the digital age we have given the audience the tools to destroy us… but we are still successful because we put the reader first and are very flexible.” When BBC Good Food Magazine made a mistake in its December 09 issue, the journalist who wrote the piece responded very defensively to feedback on Twitter and specialist food forums. This in turn created a negative perception of BBC Good Food Magazine, undermining the brand’s rhetoric that it wants to engage with its audience.

24 hour news is a good thing because it prevents governments from burying stories. The digital revolution in media allows a global audience to access British journalism. But British journalism only stays good, if journalists stick to their ethical responsibilities. I feel that the biggest percentage of poor quality journalism comes from a lack of specialist journalists, who can effectively evaluate science and health stories. The media coverage of the possible links between the MMR vaccine and autism, and newspaper reports that the CERN particle accelerator might lead to the end of the world, are two examples of journalists not accurately reporting facts.

Journalists are first and foremost story tellers, who write copy on the basis of their investigation and interpretation of facts. But with the pressures of the 24 news cycle, and the desire by media organisations to create multi-platform digital media without extra cost, journalists have to cut corners because they don’t have enough time. As the Chairman of the BBC Editorial Standards Committee Richard Tait puts it; “Strong stories are good stories, but accurate stories are even better”. The blondes are better than brunettes at business story, is an example of how damaging speed churnalism can be for a big international brand like the BBC. Audiences saw the original story for 24 hours and so the brand loses credibility when the story is changed.

According to Peter Preston, the Director of the Guardian Foundation; “interpreting, trusting and communicating the news is key, but what we will be doing, in what method, no one has any idea!” As the digital revolution in media increases the pressures on journalists to produce more stories in multimedia formats, the bad practices of not verifying information, of relying on press releases and agency copy, and of skipping editorial processes in the name of speed will only create more bad journalism. The creation of poor journalism continues to undermine the public’s faith in the media. Speed does increase pressure on governments, but with the rise of aggregating online news services like Google, it is important that the ethical standards of journalism are stuck to, or the quality of British journalism will suffer under the intense scrutiny of the online world.

Independently Funded News Consortium in Wales bids: Taliesin, Tinopolis, UTV

In the Wales Millenium Centre this evening, the three rival bidders for the Independently Funded News Consortium (INFC) in Wales presented their bids in a public meeting.

The INFC panel answered questions on the Wales regional pilot, and all three bidders took questions from the floor.

The three bids are from Taliesin, Tinopolis and UTV.

My interview with Taliesin Chairman

My interview with Tinopolis Chairman

My interview with NWM Media who are part of UTV’s bid

The future of the Welsh Pilot post general election

Interestingly the INFC panel were not able to confirm that the contract with the winning bid would be finished by the time of the general election.

The Conservatives have repeatedly said that they are opposed to the three regional pilot schemes, and so the panel could not confirm that the contract with the winning bid would survive after the general election.

To be fair it is not really in the panel’s power to make that sort of assurance.

ITV Wales Staff

ITV has not discussed with any of the rival bids, staff outside of their ITV Wales news team. But the ITV Wales building holds staff which work on a much wider spectrum of programs.

Despite repeated questions for the National Union of Journalists representative, none of the bidders could confirm that they would take on staff who are not directly involved in the current news output.

However all three bids were keen to stress that they want to take on and develop ITV Wales’ existing journalists.

Financing local news

All three bids seemed fairly realistic that the two years funding being offered for this pilot was not enough to finance the bids long-term.

All three also seemed to say that once the pilot had been established it would be hard to remove because they would all develop a core Welsh audience.

UTV said that they were unhappy that ITV were effectively getting a news programme for free and not giving anything in return, specifically advertising revenue.

Taliesin were not forthcoming about how they would finance themselves post the two year pilot, and did seem to indicate that more public money would be needed to sustain their bid after the two years of IFNC funding.

Tinopolis where the most open about the fact that they want to get revenue from other streams than just the money being offered from the IFNC. But considering that they want to give away lots of their content without copyrite to ‘citizen journalists’, it was not very clear about how they were going to finance their long-term development.

Twitter

During the course of the public consultation I live tweeted about the event.

One of the questions I asked the panel was that all three bids seemed to be very similar, because of the parameters that the panel had given.

• All three want a internet hub to aggregate multi platform content which will engage with citizen journalists.
• All three want to provide coverage across the whole of Wales by using journalists from all over Wales. I.e coverage won’t be so Cardiff focused.
• All three want a pool of journalists in the Welsh Assembly to scrutinise and report what goes on. But all three will make sure that what the Assembly does is seen as really relevant to the lives of people in Wales.
• All three want to work with other organisations both within the industry and outside it.
• All three want to develop Grassroots Journalism and escape from their fortresses.

UTV focused on the fact that public money was being used so they should provide a content which has a public service.

I think this is a valid point but surely this is what ITV Wales should be doing now, not what should be happening in the future.

Tinopolis focused on the fact that they are really for open sourcing their content. I think this is great but am concerned about how they will finance this long term.

Sadly Taliesin where not give the opportunity to respond to my question, but have said in other sessions that they are really about a multi platform news provision which works in partnership with grass roots community journalism.

I am concerned that all the things that Taliesin want to do are unfeasible because of the small amount of cash being offered by the IFNC.

Science Journalism

Cardiff University has recently published new research into Science Journalism in the UK.

In summary it says that science journalism is widely criticised because it is not placed into context. Journalists are having to work for longer, produce more copy, and so have less time to write stories.

All this happens at the same time as the industry suffers because of the recession, which has resulted in wide spread job cuts.

Certainly worth a look.

Taliesin News Consortium and Cardiff Journalism School

Today the leaders of the Taliesin News bid came to run a focus group with Cardiff Journalism School broadcast and newspaper students.

The three leaders of the bid Clive Jones the Chairman of GMTV who currently sits on S4C board of directors, Phil Henfrey the Head of News at ITV Wales and Jonathon Hill the presenter of ITV Wales took a bit of a grilling from Cardiff students.

The bid

Taliesin want to create a Welsh  multi media platform for lots of different types of digital content which is relevent to their Welsh audience.  Since the ITV Wales program is currently growing its audience the programme won’t really change.

The new website will include content from a range of Taliesin producers including a radio service, local newspapers, blogs and citizen journalists.

The key part of Taliesin’s pitch is that their content will be available to everyone. Hospital radio, universities, citizen journalists and bloggers will have access to Taliesin’s content, and be able to produce content which will then be in Taliesin’s programming.

Current problems with the ITV Wales website

Last year we had a lecture by Micheal Jermey ITV’s director of news and current affairs in which he gave us a preview of the new ITV website.

Since then I have been monitoring the ITV Wales site and comparing it to BBC Wales. The big problem with the ITV site is that is mainly full of video content, with little writing or other forms of digital media.

The videos are very hard to access and have no option for comments.  Since there are no blogs it is impossible to engage with ITV Wales about what they are showing in their programming. They are well hidden in their fortress.

Editorialist verses aggregator

Taliesin hope to change this by being “the first stop” for news in Wales. They will display all their content from a range of platforms in one place, and will guide their viewers through the content online.

However I left the focus group confused about Taliesin’s  aims for their out reach programmes.

The Taliesin bid talked about how it wants to get involved in communities and through training, bring in user-generated content which could be used in their bulletins.

But I am confused about how they would do this. On the one hand Taliesin want to develop beat bloggers who would report stories from their communities. The content the bloggers produced would be aggregated on Taliesin’s site, alongside the content produced by their journalists.

But Taliesin also say that they would need to maintain some form of editorial control, to make sure that these bloggers did not inadvertently get them sued. There is then a danger that Taliesin could become a ” big brother”.

It is a very expensive model to train up community groups and then monitor their output to insure it meets journalistic standards. Considering how small Taliesin is I am still not sure that this model is workable.

The Welsh language

The pilots are being initially financed by using the digital switchover surplus money. This will only finance an English language broadcast service.

Although Taliesin are hoping to generate revenue from other streams, it will be a long time before they have enough money to do a Welsh language news programme.

Considering that Taliesin wants to be a Welsh brand, it is problematic that they will only be able to produce an English language service when they first start.

The Brand Image

Finally my last concern with the Taliesin bid was that the graphic for the Taliesin brand looked too much like the Sky News title. The only difference I could see was it’s colours.

If Taliesin wants to create a strong brand they need better graphics.

It does sound positive

I do think that the Taliesin bid is really trying to produce a better range of content than ITV Wales currently manages.  Hopefully the focus group with Cardiff students has produced some constructive ideas, which will help Taliesin develop strong local content for the people of Wales.

I believe it is crucial for the future of local news, that broadcasters integrate their content with their audience and citizen journalists. Although I still need to be convinced that Taliesin has the perfect solution.

Someone drops the ball in Tory HQ

Most people will by now have seen the very nice photos of Mr Cameron in various cities across the UK saying he won’t cut NHS spending.

There is one in Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and other parts of South Wales where the Conservatives think they can win. It sounds like a very interesting idea except that the pledge only applies to England.

Even if David Cameron gets elected Labour’s Edwina Hart will still have control over NHS spending in Wales.

Whoever is in power in Westminster will probably cut funding to the assembly, all the major parties seem to agree that this is a likely possibility.

Considering the number of grants the Welsh Assembly has given to local authorities to help with their education provision over the past few years, you do have to wonder if the cuts in the assembly’s budget by Westminster could also void Gordon Browns promise to ring fence education spending.

Yet again in political news, it seems that only Betsan Powys and Tomos Livingstone picked up on this point. Most of the mainstream media ignored any devolution implications as per usual. It’s frustrating because it also appears that the political parties are also ignoring the devolution differences in their manifesto pledges.

I know that in the past Wales has sometimes been left off the map, but I do hope that the up coming election takes into account the differences between Wales and the rest of the UK.

2010: the year I get a job

Happy New Year everyone and I hope you all had a lovely break with your families and friends. Those of you who follow my tweets will know that I didn’t get stuck in the Eurostar pre christmas mess and did actually make it to the mountains. Hoorah!

So what now with this blog?

My last post was one of my pieces of submitted coursework for my online journalism course, the same course that lead to this blogs creation. Now that the course has finished to make way for the production day madness of semester two, I am left wondering what I will do with this blog.

Some of my contemporaries vowed never to blog again at the end of last semester, although I am fairly certain that was a result of the final crazy week of deadlines and parties.

Plus while I have been on the Christmas break so many interesting things have happened; Stephen Fry has disappeared from twitter, there was another foiled terrorist attack which apparently every security agency in the world knew was going to happen, but didn’t tell us about it and social networking sites replaced the customer service phone line at the peak of Eurostar’s troubles.

This is also a very important few months for me as a student journalist because hopefully by this time next year I will get paid for doing something that I love.

So this blog will continue, as an outpost for my views on what is happening in journalism.

Hopefully it will also chart my progress to paid employment, something which my parents keep reminding me needs to happen soon.

Cardiff’s Christmas

Christmas lights on Cardiff High Street

Cardiff is the best place to go shopping in Wales, and the sixth best place to go shopping in the UK. However other market polls have put Cardiff much further down the list at number 21.

In the run up to Christmas Cardiff transforms into a shoppers paradise and with the recent completion of the St Davids complex this change is much more noticeable.

I went to investigate how the redevelopment of Cardiff city centre has enhanced the celebration of Christmas in the city.

Shopping options in the city

Cardiff has the biggest John Lewis in Wales and a wide variety of smaller boutique shops. From mid November the city turns on its Christmas lights and opens its ice skating rink in the Winter Wonderland.

Christmas trees are springing up all over Cardiff

Combined with Queen Street and the Christmas Market near the Cardiff Castle, Cardiff gives shoppers a wide range of options.

St Davids  and the redevelopment of the city centre

When the new St Davids Centre opened on 22nd October, 50 retailers opened shops inside the centre. Since then a further 30 have opened stores with another 13 expected in the new year.

However as you can see on the St Davids  website not all of the available retail spaces have yet been sold. This is a result of the twin pressures facing the whole retail sector at the moment;

• People are not spending as much as they used to because everything is more expensive.
• Shops are not earning as much as they used to because people are not spending and therefore they are not necessarily expanding.

Despite the difficulties of the financial recession St Davids  had three-quarters of a million visitors in its first three days and will be opening more shops in the New Year.

The City of Arcades

Cardiff is often called the City of Arcades because of its high concentration of Victorian and Edwardian Shopping Arcades which house a variety of small boutique shops and cafes.

View Larger Map

The Cardiff Central Market Traders Association was concerned that Cardiff City Council was overlooking the needs of the Arcades in a time of financial recession. They claimed that the council overlooked the High Street and St Mary’s Street by being too focused on the redevelopment of Queen Street.

Some of the boutique shops in the Arcades have closed down over the past 6 months, which means that Morgan’s Arcade amongst others has got empty shops available for leasing in the New Year.

The Morgan Arcade St Mary's street entrance

However traders are now saying that they face  decreasing sales in the run up to Christmas because of the weather, not as a result of the redevelopment of the city centre.

Shoppers seem to prefer visiting St Davids and the linked Queens Arcade complex when the weather turns bad, and after weeks of heavy rains in Cardiff this is starting to impact the Arcades sales.

However as Christmas gets ever closer more and more people are using the specialist shops in the Arcades to buy unique presents for their loved ones.

Christmas in Cardiff

The redevelopment of Cardiff City Centre has provided a greater range of opportunities for festive activities in the city.

The turning on of the Christmas lights attracted thousands of people, when the cast of Merlin switched on the Christmas Lights.

The Cardiff Arms Park Choir who rehearse in the Cardiff Blues club house, attended the opening of John Lewis in the St Davids Centre. They have also performed in the Queens Arcade so the redevelopment has given them more performance spaces.

The St Davids Centre has set up a performance stage in between the Morgan Arcade and its Trinity Street entrance. The fans of X Factor star Llyod Daniels shut down this street on Monday night.

When combined with all the Christmas lights between the Arcades and St Davids, it creates a festive atmosphere between all the different retail sections of Cardiff.

The redevelopment has brought more people to Cardiff

Two years ago Cardiff city centre was dominated by ugly 1960s architecture and busy roads.

Last year the city centre was mainly a building site, which hindered Christmas shopping and drove potential customers to out of town shopping centres.

With the new pedestrian zones and the completion of St Davids, Cardiff is once again a welcoming place for people from across South Wales to come shopping.