Sustainable Journalism

Here is a report Helen Plint and I put together on baby sign language classes in Cardiff.

More and more parents are trying to communicate with their little ones before they can talk, and advocates of baby signing say they notice a real difference in a child’s temperament through learning basic British Sign Language. Such classes are controversial with some experts though; The Royal College of Speech Language Therapists believe learning sign language could actually delay a child’s speech as they can reach a level of understanding with their parents without the need to talk.

Whether it works or not, it’s certainly one of those stories with an added ‘aaaah’ factor!

Right so the gloves are off and the bids are in for Wales’s new news services to replace Channel 3′s news slot. I’ve been following this IFNC business for a couple of months now, so thought it’d be apt to briefly outline the next chapter in the unfolding saga.

In what was meant to be a public meeting to discuss the three bids at the Wales Millennium Centre last week, it soon became clear the room was full of journalists eager to learn the future of their profession. Each of the three bids had 7 minutes to pitch their proposals to the audience leaving half an hour afterwards for questions.  Here’s a brief synopsis of the three bids.

Tinopolis

Tinopolis the Welsh production company based in Llanelli boasted their welshness from the outset. They reckon their work with S4C for the past 20 years means they clearly have the expertise to provide a service for the whole of Wales after implying that the current service is very Cardiff centric. However they lack any direct experience of daily news gathering and broadcasting having only produced factual documentaries and current affairs programming like Question Time.

This meant their promo video had a gaping hole in it – there was plenty of what they could do now but very little about what would come in their future service. No concepts of a brand or how the programme or website might look. All fell a little flat for me if I’m honest.

Taliesin News

Named after a 16th century Welsh poet you can only hope that’s about as high-brow as this bids going to get. Golden rule we’ve been taught so far in our training is to keep it simple and straightforward – the name Taliesin doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue does it?

That aside their bid seems to be the most robust and the biggest force to contend with. Dubbed on their website as the ‘Grand alliance’ there are loads of media groups in the consortium including ITN, with ITV Wales news staff, independent producer Boomerang, Newsquest, Northcliffe Media, Town & Country Broadcasting, owners of several radio stations in Wales, and the media departments of four Welsh Universities, including Cardiff. A couple a weeks back they came into JOMEC and gave us a sneak preview of their plans.

Its main problem is whether they will really provide anything different to what’s on offer at the moment. Is it a new holistic approach to journalism in Wales or simply joining forces with other media organisations to churn out more of the same? Its key proposals were to allow content to be used freely and to train up a network of citizen journalists who’d be free to use audio and video clips on their own smaller community websites.

Had a bit of a wait for the video to be put onto youtube (cheers for the heads up DJ Leekee)- not a great start in the mission to bestow others with their content. Surely it was just early teething problems. But will an incumbent management team really be able to provide something new and fresh from what came before?

UTV and NWN Media

When Richard Hooper, former deputy chairman of Ofcom who was chairing the day’s proceedings, invited this bid up to the plenary he made a special point to emphasise what the U in UTV stands for – and thats Ulster. This outside bid from Michael Wilson, managing director of UTV’s successful ITV franchise in Northern Ireland did not pull any punches. Boasting that they’ve an audience share double that of ITV Wales and that they know how to cover a devolved power they certainly looked like they knew their stuff. They’d also hired a van adorned with a massive LCD screen on its side which drove around the city in the morning and had conveniently parked itself outside the WMC when everybody was leaving showing this video.

That one I could embed. So Wales Live is their proposal and like Taliesin their website is already up and running. In partnership with NWN Media they stressed that North Wales has been left out in the cold for too long and that Assembly coverage needed to be made much more accessible. However I think they’re going to have to really go that extra mile if they are going to clinch the pilot from two home grown proposals – however able they profess to be.

What happens next?

Because of the competitive nature of each of the bids the intricacies of business models and unique elements of each of them were presented to the judging panel behind closed doors earlier in the morning. To us punters then it meant all three bids looked intrinsically the same; promising multi-platforms, embracing citizen journalism and plenty of Twitter, it sounded more like a box ticking exercise than a fresh approach to news for Wales. My coursemate Hannah Green had the initiative to get interviews with all three heads of the bidding teams; her blog gets digging a little deeper than my cynical rhetoric riddled analysis.

I don’t know what to make of it all to be quite honest, and the huge elephant in the room is the fast approaching general election. The Conservatives are vehemently against IFNC’s and shadow minister for culture Jeremy Hunt has vowed to pull the plug should the Conservatives triumph. Therefore a decision on who gets the pilot will be made by the end of March and it feels like it’s a race against time to get things up and running before such a castration can be made.

Risky business this I reckon, I’m no expert but usually a rushed job is a botched job. So in that case I hope whoever wins is experienced enough to know what they’re doing and are able to hit the ground running on what will no doubt but a rocky ride ahead.