You Won't Believe What Happens Next....

(Pic : [Various] Wales Online, via BBC Wales)

In the midst of a review of the BBC's future role, the focus briefly shifted back to the Welsh press last week.

Fronted by a warning from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Western Mail chief reporter, Martin Shipton, revealed that Trinity Mirror journalists (Trinity Mirror being Media Wales' parent company) will have an online "click quota" to meet from January 2016. This "reform" is in addition to a number of cuts to editorial posts at Media Wales.

As I mentioned in passing last week, the quality of some stories on Wales Online - Media Wales' online portal - has been absolutely dire over the summer, verging on embarrassing.

Silly season is a quiet period for news anyway, but this year Wales Online was dominated by Buzzfeed-style "listicles" with Welsh themes, the most recent examples I can think of being a Channel 4 weather presenter pronouncing Llanfairpwll, The Welsh Food Bucket List and....this (tongue in cheek) response to a serious report on the future of the Welsh economy from the Bevan Foundation.

For entertainment it's fine, and I'm as guilty of clicking on this stuff as the next person, but as journalism and news it's....well it's neither, is it?

As Martin clearly prides himself on covering detailed, complex stories (most of the time), he's spoken out against "clickbait" before, and the quality of journalism in the print version of The Western Mail is often so different to Wales Online you wouldn't think they were produced in the same building. The situation is compounded by year-on-year declines in sales of The Western Mail.

Somewhat inevitably, Assembly Members and MPs have raised concerns these changes will lead to more online articles about fluff, and less focus on investigative journalism and their own pet causes major stories from the National Assembly.

Ultimately it's a business; Media Wales need to make money or they go out of business altogether. People gobble up clickbait like there's no tomorrow. You can do that by getting people angry - Wales Online's tactic is to prod Plaid Cymru and rugby supporters because they're more likely to react on social media and draw more clicks. You can also do it by appealing to nostalgia - history and "decade" articles tend to be popular online wherever you go.

The NUJ's concerns have reinforced long-standing worries about a decline in, or lack of, quality coverage
of Welsh politics. Questions about whether there are enough quality stories to cover remain though.
(Pic : via Storify).

Your average political story from the Assembly has about as much mass appeal as a post-midnight organic chemistry seminar on BBC4 and is drier than a cream cracker sandwich  – I should know, I write about it regularly enough.

"30 Things You Would Only Know If You Grew Up In Llanelli In The 1980s" is the online equivalent of Eastenders crossed with a common cold virus.

Clickbaiting works in terms of driving traffic, but quality of traffic is what advertisers really want and Media Wales are in danger of trashing their reputation.

Journalists can try and mix the two approaches (i.e. present a serious political story in a similar manner to a Buzzfeed-style listicle) but doing so risks coming across as patronising and expends more effort than a journalist would writing a traditional/dull article.

Welsh not British - and before it went into hiatus, Daily Wales - have probably come closest to successfully combining the two through the very effective use of social media, while some of the best investigative journalism has come from Jac o' the North.

The political blogosphere is always ignored in any conversation on the Welsh media, probably because most of us are politically biased and very few of us have press credentials. That means we don't get past "gatekeepers" (like party communications teams and PR firms), are indirectly censored and will never receive official support.

If the political blogosphere disappeared overnight nobody would admit to missing it. So it's not about whether Welsh politics gets covered as such, because it certainly does – safe to say I've done quite a bit of work covering the National Assembly over the last four years with an admittedly modest readership.

It's more about the credibility and credentials of who's covering it. Politicians and the Bay Bubble want trained, serious, proper journalists working for proper newspapers doing it – like Westminster. They want hacks stumbling over themselves to get their (AMs) thoughts of the latest cause, debate or national disgrace/scandal – like Westminster. They want packed press briefing rooms and opportunities to get their names out there - like Westminster.

Aside from major stories and their media officers being offered the opportunity to provide rent-a-quotes, what AMs actually get is members of the public they've never met with too much time on their hands and a Blogger/Wordpress account doing it for laughs – like Oggy Bloggy Ogwr.

It's a bit like expecting All The President's Men, but getting Sniffin' Glue.

At the end of the day, politics is a very narcissistic profession - no matter how good the stuff on the blogosphere often is, I presume AMs take the fact that amateur "citizen journalists" and anoraks are often the only people taking what they say seriously as some sort of insult.

However, you can understand why AMs want "proper coverage", because a lack of broad reach, broad audience media scrutiny (of the government in particular) makes their job ten times harder.

If politicians want people to know that public services are failing them, the public (as many of them as possible - hundreds of thousands rather than hundreds) firstly need to understand it. Then the public need to see that someone is holding decision-makers to account on their behalf. Because of poor coverage of the Assembly and lack of media plurality, that doesn't happen to the required standard in Wales - something that's been dubbed "The Democratic Deficit".

Wales Online - as the leading online news website in Wales - usually, but not always, tucks those important but dry articles at the bottom of their page, hives them off into a hard-to-read/find "politics section", or publishes them alongside articles with titles like 25 Beards That Shocked Welsh Football (I originally wrote that as a parody, but this showed up yesterday).

Who's the joke here? Media Wales or the readers/people sharing this stuff on social media? They wouldn't write clickbait if it didn't draw an audience.

Hyperlocals are growing in popularity, but are they cut out to cover politics at a national level?
It's a gap that, realistically, only the mainstream media can close.
(Pic : BBC Wales)

There's going to have to be discussion of a long-term successor to The Western Mail. As the only Welsh newspaper with a shaky claim of being a "national" one, its agonisingly slow decline is going to eventually leave a vacuum. That will seriously dent current affairs coverage as the Argus, Western Telegraph, Evening Post and Daily Post are as parochial as the Echo.

There've been various summits and Assembly investigations into both the state of the Welsh media generally and coverage of the National Assembly, but nothing concrete has happened beyond discussion and expressions of concern.

A conference on hyperlocal media was held at Cardiff University last week (Twitter feed #CJ15), and while hyperlocals like the Caerphilly Observer and Wrexham.com might be successful at replacing or supplementing local papers, the in-depth national coverage we desperately need in Wales will have to come from somewhere else.

The IWA's Click on Wales is the largest independently-run English language current affairs site in the country and the closest to being an accredited one. It's become the mouthpiece of the Bay Bubble, but it also (alongside Agenda magazine) receives public funding from the Wales Book Council - although that's good news in the short term, it should raise questions about its long-term viability. Golwg 360 is the closest equivalent in Welsh.

ITV Wales put in a lot of effort, and arguably have the best current affairs show in Sharp End, but the future of day-to-day domestic political coverage looks set to be dominated by BBC Wales and S4C – online and offline. That's a potential catastrophe : what happens when "the only game in town" is itself threatened after becoming a monopoly on serious news?

The BBC and S4C could see more cutbacks of their own (Strapped 4 Cash?), then current affairs coverage will be in the firing line at the expense of marketable network shows. Services will fall back to the point AMs will have to publish news from the Assembly themselves! For example, Ann Jones AM (Lab, Vale of Clwyd) had been keeping us all up to date with the latest hill climbing algorithms and monster hacks. Facebook and Twitter can't really replace good copy or insider gossip either.

Relying too much on the BBC (and S4C) to provide serious current affairs journalism is a potential disaster.
(Pic : BBC Wales)

If you want an idea of what the future of national news coverage is going to look like ( unless something's done) then take a look at your local council.

Most objective coverage of local government is gone and has been replaced by human interest stories, PR departments and "town hall Pravdas". Where they still exist, local print newspapers – which have been cut to the bone in terms of staff and funding - generally reproduce press releases and rarely break stories by themselves anymore. Bloggers (who exist primarily because of a media coverage gap) get a few hundred hits on a post, manage to piss everyone off, then get sued or ignored or accused of racism or whatever.

Here's a (gloomy) vision of the Welsh media in 2030 :

Trinity Mirror's non-UK wide titles, including The Western Mail, will be Metro-style freesheets produced in London using a single template, tailored to each region. It'll consist mainly of adverts, sport (particularly betting odds) and popular culture stories with a Welsh twist. Welsh Government and political party press releases will be collated at Trinity Mirror's "innovative politics hub" in Fleet Steet, and published wherever there's free space to do so in the print version.

Online readers - who will now be the majority - will be able to turn off boring news feeds. Investigative journalism will be left to freelancers and specialist publications, but hardly any of it will happen in Wales. A few will end up in prison or destitute because they don't have legal or regulatory protection.

S4C will have bit the bullet and become BBC Cymru. ITV Wales will just about be maintaining a "regional identity", but current affairs coverage will be reduced to news bulletins only (as required by Ofcom). Local radio stations will keep chugging along, but mainly as affiliates of UK-wide brands as the barrier to entry for broadcast radio rises due to a digital switchover.

The Welsh political blogosphere will have long gone extinct because of the sheer number of "formal police investigations". There'll be few, if any, regional newspapers within Wales - The Glamorgan Gazette will be a Google FaceTwittergram account run from Cardiff, focusing on pub reviews and photos of food.

Volunteer-run hyperlocal websites will occasionally publish a print version with (well-meaning) government support, and will be hailed as the "next big thing", but most will close after a few years due to lack of time, funding and anyone willing to take over.

So what can we do?