Broadcasting Sub-committee

BSC(3)-03-09 : Paper 1 : 5 March 2009

Evidence gathering on the current state of the Welsh Newspaper Industry - Heritage Minister

The Welsh Assembly Government has regularly referred to the importance of plurality of services in Wales in relation to broadcasting. Plurality is also vital in the context of the newspaper industry in Wales.

I welcome the fact that this sub-committee is investigating these matters.  It is also very timely considering the recent announcement by Trinity Mirror about the restructuring of its organisation in Wales. The Welsh Assembly Government was concerned to hear about the changes proposed by Trinity Mirror.  There has been a significant reduction in employees at Media Wales, in 2003 there were 826 employees, by 2007 this number had reduced to 553. This situation is set to continue following recent announcements.

Welsh citizens are not best served by the UK’s national print media.  You need to look very hard to find news about Welsh politics in the UK’s main newspaper titles.  This only serves to underline the key role played by the regional news outlets.  In a Welsh context the Western Mail, the Daily Post and the other Trinity Mirror titles in Wales have long played a crucial role in making sure that Welsh citizens can read in the newspapers about the political process which affects their every day lives.

The Welsh Assembly Government’s support for Welsh-medium magazines and newspapers is channelled through the Welsh Books Council.

As part of its support for Welsh-language magazines (£360,000 annually to support 16 magazines), the Books Council provides grants to the value of £173,000 (in 2008/09) for three publications in the field of news and current affairs.

Magazine franchises are advertised every three years, and support is usually promised for a three-year period. The process for the next funding round (2009/10-2011/12) has recently been completed.

The Books Council also administers the new grant provided by the Assembly Government to establish and maintain a Welsh-language news service on the internet.  This fulfils the commitment in One Wales. To this end, a sum of £200,000 annually has been awarded to Golwg Newydd for the period 2008-11, and the company intends to launch the service this spring.  This is in addition to the £173,000 which is currently being spent by the Welsh Assembly Government, through the Welsh Books Council, on Welsh-medium news and current affairs publications  

Golwg’s plans to establish an on-line news service is very exciting and will be a significant boost to the Welsh language print media and will strengthen and extend the current provision. I am confident that this development will lead to more people reading Welsh especially among young people.

The Welsh Assembly Government, through the Welsh Language Board, also fund the hugely popular publications papurau bro and they will receive £72,420 during the current financial year.

The Welsh Books Council also has a remit to support Welsh writing in English.  To this end it allocates an annual grant of approximately £175,000, which supports three literary/cultural magazines (Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and Planet) and a literary supplement in Cambria.

Magazine franchises are advertised every three years and support is usually promised for a three-year period.  Applications for the 2009/10-2011/12 funding round are currently being assessed.

Last autumn the Welsh Assembly Government established a Broadcasting Advisory Group to examine a range of options for ensuring that English language television programmes from Wales continue to offer plurality to viewers with regard to news, current affairs and general interest programmes.

The Broadcasting Advisory Group expressed concern over the state of print journalism in Wales and the Welsh Assembly Government endorsed the group’s report. Relevant extracts from the report in relation to print journalism are attached below:

The media deficit in Wales is evidenced by the fact that indigenous print media are already very limited and are threatened by structural change. No London newspaper publishes a Welsh edition. Nearly 90% of daily newspaper readers in Wales are reading papers with no Welsh content.

Taking into account the heightened democratic and cultural needs of a country experiencing newly devolved government, the totality of media provision in Wales must contribute to and fully reflect:

i. a properly informed democracy, able to access high quality reportage, analysis and investigation from a variety of professional sources.

ii. a culturally rounded society, for which the media provide adequate room for full and varied expression.

iii. a visibly creative economy in which the media pioneer innovation and are a driver of the creative industries.

For these reasons, the Assembly’s need, as a still relatively new and novel institution, to develop a deep level of engagement with the public has represented a large and pressing challenge. In its first decade it has faced the challenge of writing itself into the narrative of people’s lives from a standing start, and in the context of a public disengagement from politics that afflicts most democracies in the developed world.

It has not been helped by the almost total absence of references to Wales in the news pages of London newspapers and the central news services of the BBC, Sky, ITV and Channel 4. Only in 2008 did the BBC begin to react to this massive editorial lacuna, following the report by Professor Tony King for the BBC Trust. There has been no comparable response from any of the other London-based media.

This has only redoubled the need for a continuing active response from Welsh media, and for a raised level of journalism within Wales. This has not been easy to achieve in an era when the economic and technological pressures on original journalism have been severe, often combining reductions in staff with a requirement for increased multi-media output. Indeed, some commentators have likened constitutional development, on the one hand, and journalism and media development on the other, to two vehicles on a motorway travelling in the opposite direction. The over-riding policy objective must be to bring the two into a positive alignment.

The prospect of such large and avoidable reductions in the audiences to news and current affairs is all the more forbidding given the absence at the all-Wales level of any speech radio competition for the BBC and the very limited nature of Welsh print media. The IWA audit earlier this year described a situation where "each day only 100,000 readers in Scotland read newspapers with almost no Scottish content, whereas in Wales 1,760,000 are reading papers with virtually no Welsh content.” Its report concluded: "It seems to us impossible to argue that those figures do not have serious consequences for informed democracy in Wales.”

It is important that this public purpose remains to the fore, so that citizenship and civil society is supported. Despite the considerable progress of recent years, broadcast and print journalism in Wales still has some way to go before it matches, qualitatively, in every regard the challenges posed by the existence of new legislatures and governments. We would stress that these new institutions, while serving the three nations, are also an integral part of the British constitution. For that reason, their needs in terms of public engagement, and their ultimate success are issues not only for Wales but also for the UK as a whole.

Alun Ffred Jones AM,
Minister for Heritage