We see that the Beeb has caught up with our post of last Thursday about declining circulation figures in the Welsh regional press.
Understandably, the focus is mostly on the Western Mail, with ample comment from ex and current Trinity Mirror bods keen to talk the group’s future prospects. But in the commercial world, the claim that circulation was "improving slightly" sounds more like a clinical euphemism than a business projection.
Some analysts might also put a slight question mark against the comment by Alan Edmunds, publishing director at Media Wales, that the company's website was helping them reach a "large audience". Recent figures show the same downward trend, year-on-year, for web traffic at WalesOnline - although they still record the largest proportion of visits out of the three main news sites.
Meanwhile, and just a little ironically, it is Martin Shipton writing in the Western Mail who produces what is probably the best analysis so far of the on-going troubles at S4C.
Having recounted the improbable thinking behind an assumed continuity of the Welsh language channel, and focused on the tenure arrangements for interim chief exec Arwel Ellis Owen, Shipton quotes one of those ubiquitous insiders who states:
“The new leadership of S4C needs to neutralise the perception that it’s nothing more than a self-serving clique of Welsh language bigwigs commissioning their friends to produce programmes that a decreasing number of especially younger people don’t want to watch. It’s that perception which in some quarters has led to S4C being referred to as S Pedwar Cheque”.
After metaphysical fluff from Owen about Wales’ status as the first fully digital country in the UK, the article ends nicely with him ruling out any question of the channel reverting to merely a peak hours operation, stating rather inadvisably, “people would find that unacceptable”.
Such statements not only have a way of sounding slightly pompous through repetition but also tend to become self-fulfilling. But then, something which Owen and his contemporaries in the Welsh media monopoly often overlook is that effective journalism is usually nothing more than knowing how and when to ask the right question.
1 Comments:
No one connected with S4C can complain. They've had a bloody good run, people have got rich, mediocrities have held positions of authority that would have been denied them in the real world, but now the bubble has burst.
But let us ensure that it is just S4C that is brought to heel and that nobody is allowed to use the channel's manifest shortcomings against the language itself.
A slimmed-down S4C accountable to the Assembly, producing programmes that people want to watch, should be the goal. And emulate what the Irish have done, in basing Irish language broadcasting in Galway, by transferring S4C to Aberystwyth. For the vast majority of Welsh speakers live on the western side of the country - so why have S4C in Cardiff?
Further, one of the great promises held out by S4C at its inception was that there would many independent producers in unlikely locations such as Caernarfon. That lasted a few years then, like everything else in modern Wales, everything began to slide towards Cardiff.
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