Possible ideas for the shape of 21st century Welsh media?

With all the issues around the Welsh media I have been looking at some of the solutions that other parts of the UK and how other countries deal with the issue of a lack of strength in depth of local media and I have found two possible options, one in the private sector and one in public sector.

The first is the Scottish online daily newspaper the Caledonian Mercury launched in January this year and ‘The site was set up and is edited by Stewart Kirkpatrick, who ran the Scotsman's website from 2000 to 2007, with its start-up costs financed by himself and his two partners at their marketing consultancy W00tonomy. The operation will be financially very lean. Relying heavily on freelancers and promoted entirely with web-based and viral marketing, Kirkpatrick believes it will break even with a relatively modest 20,000 to 30,000 unique users a day, reading between 1m and 2m pages a month. Advertisers may also sponsor entire sections.’

The second is the Catalan New Agency which has been going since 1999 and in its ‘about us’ section says ‘The Catalan News Agency (CNA) is a project by Agència Catalana de Notícies (ACN) that provides an explanation of the current situation of Catalonia in the world in English, the global Internet language, and that interprets international news from a national viewpoint.

The ACN, a public corporation owned by the Catalan government, is one of the first digital news agencies created in Europe and has been operating since 1999. It is a pioneer in the use of information technologies, teleworking and decentralised organisation applied to a virtual journalistic environment.

The ACN currently employs over 80 professionals and has branches in Madrid, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin and New York. Furthermore, it shares information with other state-owned agencies and is a member of ANSAmed, the group of Mediterranean agencies. The ACN offers its informative contents in text, photographic, video and audio formats to over 250 different subscribers, such as television channels, radio channels, the press, the digital press, institutions and businesses.'

They are two different models serving different and varied media needs for both readers and views in Scotland and Catalonia and I don’t know if either or neither model could be copied or adapted for the Welsh market. But at the very least there should be a fact finding mission by those who claim to be the most concerned about the future of the Welsh Media. I mean what harm can it do to got and talk to the owners and Editors about things like how much they cost to set up and to run. We might even find a way through the current malaise.

If they still don’t understand the urgency there’s more today from Geraint Talfan Davies over at the IWA and new blogger Welsh Agenda.

Why doesn’t WAG produce regular GVA figures?

There has been some really interesting debate and discussion over the state of the Welsh Economy over the past few weeks that I hope it continues.

However with all the talk of job creation, targeting sectors, scrapping business support and inward investment which is important, there is one part of the jigsaw still missing. To really transform the Welsh Economy the Government needs to know what is going on in every sector via up to date data for every month and quarter.

Sadly in the 11 years the Welsh Assembly Government has been around, it hasn’t seen the need to collect even the most basic information needed to measure the output of the economy - I’m talking about regular GVA figures. It’s also another reason to question how serious the folks in Cardiff Bay are about tackling the deep seated economic problems Wales faces, but that's for another post.

The Office of National Statistics does produce GVA figures for the Welsh economy once a year, but they are published before Christmas and get lost in the froth of Christmas and New Year stories. And that’s not the only problem the figures published always relate to the previous year, i.e. the latest figures of 74.3% from December 2009 are for the 12 months of 2008. It means they are already a year out of date when they are published which makes them easy to dismiss by WAG Ministers and for the Opposition to use to hold the Government to account.

I can understand why WAG would be reluctant to push for publication of quarterly figures because Wales has been at the bottom of the UK table for a decade with declines year on year to the point where Wales now stands at almost 26% below the UK average.

Add to that the fact it would also show up the failures of both UK Labour and Conservative Government policies towards the Welsh economy over the decades and you can see why there is such reluctance to change the status quo.

But other parts of the UK manage it without the sky falling in, most noticeably in Scotland, where the Government next set of GVA figures for the second quarter of 2010 are to be published on October 20th.

And it’s not just in the UK that these figures are published by national or regional Governments, the Catalan Government produces regular growth and unemployment figures. The latest growth and unemployment figures for the second quarter of 2010 were published at the beginning of August.

Both examples show that accurate and regular figures can be produced contrary to what the former First Minister Rhodri Morgan’s claimed when questioned on the matter by the Opposition last year, but I’m not expecting anything to suddenly change under Carwyn or Ieuan sadly.

New ITV Wales Political Editor

It seems the rumours doing the rounds about Nick Speed’s replacement at ITV Wales are true, although there has been no official confirmation as far as I can tell.

Nick’s replacement is Adrian Masters, according to Gareth Hughes, ITV Wales Political Commentator who confirmed the news on Twitter a few days ago. Adrian is of course currently BBC Wales’s political correspondent and Dragon’s Eye and Conference Live Presenter.

It’s certainly a coup for ITV Wales and a loss for BBC Wales’s Political team, because Adrian is a well regarded journalist and someone who is also well liked by fellow journalists and politicians.

It’s also a sign that ITV Wales is looking to the future and has managed to pull back from the brink just a few months back.

If the news is confirmed officially there will be a shake up at BBC Wales, so who will get his Dragon’s Eye seat and who will front BBC Wales conference live coverage, and was Adrian’s leaving the reason why a number of presenters fronted/ were tested on the Politics Show Wales over the last few weeks of its current run?

On a personal note I will miss Adrian and Betsan Powys shameless flirting on screen, it was often more entertaining than the stories they were covering.

‘40% chance of a double dip recession’

No, not the hysterical rantings of various Labour politicians, but the view of Graeme Leach, Chief Economist and Director of Policy at the Institute of Directors writing on the News of the World yesterday.

He wrote ‘Right now the economy looks like the Battle of Waterloo at lunch-time.

There's no certainty whatsoever of a successful outcome and there's a desperate need for something or someone to ride over the hill and save the day.

For the Duke of Wellington the 'someone' was the arrival of the Prussians, for George Osborne the 'something' will need to be stronger growth in the money supply.
Until the amount of money in the economy grows faster than at present, on a sustained basis, we can't have any confidence the recovery is durable.

But what about the strong growth in GDP in the second quarter you might ask?

Yes the rate of growth was good, but that's likely to be as good as it gets in this recovery. The evidence to date in the third quarter suggests a softening in economic activity if you look at surveys and the housing market.

The labour market looks fairly weak as well, and that's before any shake-out from the public sector gets underway.

So what is the economic outlook? I would give a 40 per cent probability to what I call 'one L of a recovery', in other words a fairly weak flattish cycle over the next 12 months.

A double-dip recession would get a 40 per cent probability as well.

But if we do end up with a double-dip, I wouldn't blame fiscal policy - public spending reductions.

I think the greater threat to the economy at present is with monetary policy and continued de-leveraging by the banks.

The best scenario, with continued growth at the 1.1 per cent (qtr-on-qtr) rate seen in the second quarter, only gets a 20 per cent probability on my reckoning.

What's more even if we do get strong GDP growth for 2-3 quarters that will not be the end of the story.

With inflation 'sticky' and above target, any acceleration in GDP growth would probably trigger a modest upward movement in interest rates and the start of a reversal in quantitative easing - the end result would be a levelling off in growth in 2011.

The cycle would take the shape of a square root sign.

But for those who like near zero interest rates the odds still look stacked in your favour, with no tightening in interest rates for quite sometime yet. Enjoy.

There’s plenty in the article for the both Government’s in Cardiff and London to think about in the coming months.