Stop press? Crisis in Welsh newspapers and what to do about it

In this extended essay I look at the political economy of the press in South Wales, and argue that as the subsidy provided by commercial advertising diminishes and papers begin to close, serious public funding for a new generation of non-profit news outlets may be the only way to salvage public interest journalism in our local and regional news

There are a number of reasons for the crisis in our press industry. Newspapers have traditionally made their money in two ways: by selling news to us, and selling us to advertisers. But advertisers are currently leaving newspapers in droves. Quite understandably they no longer find subsidising our news to be profitable, and are migrating to other more lucrative markets (online search engines, social networks, classified ad websites). At the same time, we as readers no longer feel inclined to pay upfront for news. The papers all put it online for free, why would we? There’s also the problem that decades of staff cuts have left journalism severely diminished in quality and independence. Perhaps the news just isn’t worth what it used to be.

Many critics leave the diagnosis of the problem at that, blaming inevitable and unavoidable changes in the market since the rise of the internet. But there’s another cause to this crisis, which can be located firmly in corporate management strategies, and the choices we’ve taken as societies about who owns newspapers, and how that ownership should be regulated. Even before the rise of the internet, free content, and new advertising markets, newspaper companies had been steadily cutting staff to maximise profits. Since the 1980s there’s been a trend in developed media markets towards consolidation: ever-fewer and larger companies buying up more and more papers. This was enabled by a string of UK governments caving in to pressure from industry to relax regulation on media ownership. Consolidation leads to problems with editorial independence and freedom of the press (as we’ve seen so clearly this summer with the influence of Murdoch), but it also encourages these big companies to cut staff in the name of creating efficiency savings across their media empires, and arguably to prioritise the generation of profits above the production of high quality news; to favour corporate interests over the public interest.

Don’t Hate the Media, Be the Media! Why the Welsh public sphere needs radical voices.

Last month the Western Mail printed a front page a story which claimed that a lack of rich people was “holding Wales back”.

The news hook for the piece was the publication of new data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) which showed how the gap between rich and poor in Wales was smaller than anywhere else in the UK. 90% of Welsh households, we read, have a combined income of between £400-£650 per week, and millionaires are pretty few on the ground.

Instead of celebrating this (qualified) good news as a sign the nation’s wealth was more evenly distributed than elsewhere, the paper quoted a succession of very rich people arguing pretty much the opposite.

First up was the Director of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in Wales David Rosser saying that equality was all very well, but what we really need is more mega-rich people getting even richer so they can create jobs for the proles. Next came the millionaire owner of designer sprog-tog-shop JoJo Maman Baby, Laura Tenison, who bemoaned the “fact” that “more than half the population seems to work for the Assembly or in local government” and complained our “flabby public sector strangles entrepreneurship”.