The future of news in Wales
As many of you know by now The National Wales is scheduled to cease publishing at the end of this month, Tuesday the 31st of August.
A period of consultation is currently taking place with staff who are employed by the title.
I’m immensely proud of what The National achieved in its 18 months of operation. It was born from a need to improve the Welsh news landscape which has been dominated for decades by titles from England who have presented news from an English perspective. 84% of the UK population resides in England so it's only natural for these titles to speak, primarily, to this audience.
The latest Ofcom research confirms that the Daily Mail and The Sun remain the two most popular newspapers in Wales from a sales perspective and BBC Radio 2 is the most listened to radio station.
The situation in Scotland is different, there the “national” titles are published from a Scottish perspective and they have their own, truly, national titles.
The need now for a stronger news media in Wales has never been greater, particularly ones that discuss the issues that matter, the issues that impact the everyday lives of the people living in Wales, impartially and based on fact.
The news industry, in general, is facing a challenging time, production costs have increased, newsprint costs have increased 100% since the start of the year, and the rise in the price of fuel has added greatly to distribution costs.
The future isn’t digital, digital is the now. Developing sustainable business models in the digital space has become challenging in recent times and The National Wales, unfortunately, wasn’t immune to market forces.
With the cost of living crisis taking hold a subscription to a digital news service is bound to be one of the first casualties as we scroll through our direct debits looking for ways to cut down on outgoings. The National Wales subscription base was growing, at a slow but steady pace, but since March the numbers have declined, and I would imagine this to be the case across the industry as a whole. This decline coupled with a drop in advertising revenues has created a situation where a business heading towards profitability becomes unsustainable.
Do we value news as a society? Why pay when some providers provide it for free? There is a perception that one of the most dominant players in the digital news space in Wales, the BBC, is free, it isn’t, it’s funded from the licence fee. Others provide content for free based on revenues generated from advertising, but the amount of traffic required to generate sufficient revenues means the industry focuses on providing content specifically designed to drive traffic.
Real news, politics, the environment, social justice stories don’t generate the required traffic. That’s why The National Wales was a subscription service, with subscribers able to access additional content with 80% fewer advertisements.
So as subscriber revenue declined the writing was on the wall.
My involvement with The National will come to an end next Tuesday regardless of any last-minute rethinks. My role was to establish a national news service for Wales that provided quality content that benefitted Welsh civic society as a whole. We, the dedicated but small team of journalists and I, did just that, sadly the worsening economic climate led to its demise.
Can it be rescued? I don’t know, that decision is beyond my control, as it stands it will cease to exist in five days' time and two members of staff will be out of a job.
If enough people demonstrated their desire for the continuation of a National news service for Wales the decision makers would be foolish to ignore the paying Welsh public.
Regardless of the outcome I take immense pride in what was achieved and have learnt many valuable lessons and accrued a great deal of knowledge around the nature and business of news, knowledge and experience I hope to use in future endeavours.
Thank you to everyone who supported the venture and to Newsquest for giving it a go.
