.........
The
proceedings are reported in the language in which they were spoken
in the committee. In addition, a transcription of the simultaneous
interpretation is included. Where contributors have supplied
corrections to their evidence, these are noted in the
transcript.
|
Dechreuodd y cyfarfod am 09:38.
The meeting began at 09:38.
|
|
Cyflwyniad,
Ymddiheuriadau, Dirprwyon a Datgan Buddiannau
Introductions, Apologies, Substitutions and Declarations of
Interest
|
|
[1]
Bethan Jenkins:
Rydym ni’n cychwyn y cyfarfod
ffurfiol, ac eitem 1 yw cyflwyniad, ymddiheuriadau a dirprwyon.
Croeso i’r Aelodau Cynulliad. Os bydd larwm tân, dylai pawb adael yr ystafell
drwy’r allanfeydd tân penodol a dilyn
cyfarwyddiadau’r tywyswyr a’r staff, ond ni ddisgwylir
prawf heddiw. Dylai pawb droi eu ffonau symudol i fod yn dawel.
Rydym ni’n gweithredu’n ddwyieithog, ac mae clustffonau
ar gael i glywed y cyfieithiad ar y pryd ac i addasu’r sain
ar gyfer pobl sy’n drwm eu clyw. Mae’r cyfieithu ar y
pryd ar gael ar sianel 1, a gellir chwyddo’r sain ar sianel
0. Peidiwch â chyffwrdd â’r botymau ar y
meicroffonau gan y gall hyn amharu ar y system, a gofalwch fod y
golau coch ymlaen cyn dechrau siarad. A oes gan unrhyw aelod
rywbeth i’w ddatgan? Na. Nid ydym ni wedi cael unrhyw
ymddiheuriadau.
|
Bethan
Jenkins: We start the formal meeting, and item 1 is
introductions, apologies and substitutions. Welcome to Assembly
Members. In the event of a fire alarm, everyone should leave the
room by the fire exits and follow the instructions from the ushers
and staff, but a test is not expected today. Everyone should turn
their mobile phones to silent. We operate bilingually, and
headphones are available for simultaneous translation and to
amplify sound for people who are hard of hearing. The simultaneous
translation is available on channel 1, and sound amplification on
channel 0. Don’t touch any of the buttons on the microphones
as this can disrupt the system, and please ensure that the red
light is on before speaking. Has any member anything to declare? We
haven’t received any apologies.
|
|
09:39
|
|
Newyddiaduraeth Newyddion yng Nghymru: Sesiwn Dystiolaeth
5
News Journalism in Wales: Evidence Session 5
|
|
[2]
Bethan Jenkins:
Felly, rydym ni’n symud ymlaen
yn awr at eitem 2 ar yr agenda, sef ein hymchwiliad i mewn i
newyddiaduriaeth newyddion yng Nghymru, a sesiwn dystiolaeth 5.
Hoffwn i groesawu Peter Curtis, sef rheolwr yr orsaf Bay TV Swansea
Ltd, a hefyd
Carwyn Evans o Bay TV. Nid ydym ni wedi gallu ffeindio
eich swydd-ddisgrifiad ar y we yn gyflym iawn, felly a hoffech chi
ddweud wrthym ni ar y record ar ôl beth yw’ch
disgrifiad a’r teitl? Rydym ni yn aros am Daniel Glyn. Nid
ydym ni wedi derbyn ymddiheuriadau gan Made in Cardiff, ond nid
ydym ni’n siŵr eto a fydd e’n gallu dod, felly
diolch i chi.
|
Bethan Jenkins: So, we move on now to
item 2 on the agenda, which is our inquiry into news journalism in
Wales, and evidence session 5. I’d like to welcome Peter
Curtis, the station manager of Bay TV Swansea Ltd, and also Carwyn
Evans from Bay TV. We haven’t been able to find your job
description on the website quickly, so maybe you’d like to
tell us on the record what your job description and title is. We
are waiting for Daniel Glyn. We haven’t received an apology
from Made in Cardiff, but we’re not sure whether he can
attend this morning, so thank you to you both.
|
|
[3]
Rydym ni’n mynd i fynd yn syth
i’r cwestiynau, a bydd gan lot o Aelodau gwestiynau ar
themâu gwahanol ynglŷn â theledu lleol. Y cwestiwn
cyntaf sydd gen i yw: pan oeddech chi wedi cael eich sefydlu,
roeddech chi’n dweud eich bod yn mynd i wneud lot o ymdrech i
roi newyddion ar Bay TV, ac o leiaf tair awr o newyddion y dydd
o’r cychwyn—dyna roedd Made in Cardiff yn ei
ddweud—ac i gael lle amlwg. Roeddech chi wedi dweud y byddech
chi’n rhoi pwyslais mawr ar newyddion lleol. A allech chi
ddisgrifio’r hyn rydych chi’n ei wneud? Faint o oriau
ydych chi’n eu rhoi i mewn i newyddion lleol? Pa mor lleol
yw’r newyddion hynny? Ac a oes gennych chi unrhyw gynlluniau
i ehangu ar yr hyn rydych chi’n ei wneud o ran newyddion ar
Bay TV?
|
We’re
going to go straight into questions, and many Members will have
questions on different themes, with regard to local television. The
first question I have is: when you were established you said you
were going to put a lot of effort into producing news on Bay TV,
and at least three hours of news a day from the start—Made in
Cardiff said this—and that news was going to have a clear
place. You said you were going to put an emphasis on local news.
Can you tell us what you do? How many hours do you give to local
news? How local is the news? And do you have any plans to expand on
what you’re doing in terms of news on Bay TV?
|
|
[4]
Mr Curtis: If I can answer this, basically, since we
started, we’ve attempted to meet our commitment to the three
hours of news a day. We got as far as two and a half hours of
programmes that will be news or current affairs, when we started
up. We do a lunchtime programme, which you, Chair, were the first
person to appear on, and that’s an hour in length. And then
in the afternoon, at 6 o’clock, we have a quarter of an hour
of English language news, and a quarter of an hour of Welsh
language news. We then have another one-hour news programme, aimed
at a younger audience: people from the age of 18 to 40.
|
|
[5]
Bethan Jenkins:
A oes unrhyw beth gyda chi i’w
ychwanegu, Carwyn?
|
Bethan Jenkins: Do you have anything
to add, Carwyn?
|
|
[6]
Mr Evans: Beth fyddwn i’n ei ddweud, o ran—.
Roeddech chi’n sôn am ba mor lleol yw’r
newyddion, y ddau fwletin: rydym ni’n trio ei wneud e mor
agos i Abertawe â phosib. Rydym ni’n edrych ar
storïau yng Nghastell-nedd Port Talbot, a hefyd i’r
gorllewin yng Nghaerfyrddin, achos rydym ni’n credu ei fod yn
bwysig bod yr ardal yn cael cynrychiolaeth dda o newyddion bob
dydd, mewn ffordd, o’r ardaloedd mwy lleol a phenodol
hynny.
|
Mr Evans: What I would say—.
You asked how local that news coverage is: well, the two bulletins
are kept as close to Swansea as possible, in a way. We’re
looking at stories in Neath Port Talbot also, but also to the west
towards Carmarthen, because I do think it is important that the
area is represented well in terms of news on a daily basis from
those specific local areas.
|
|
[7]
Bethan Jenkins:
Ni wnes i glywed a oes gennych chi
gynlluniau i ehangu ar yr oriau newyddion: a ydych chi’n
bwriadu gwneud hynny? A hefyd, a ydych chi’n defnyddio pobl
eraill i gael eich newyddion, neu a ydych chi’n creu'r
newyddion? A ydych chi’n creu'r cynnwys eich hun?
|
Bethan Jenkins: I didn’t hear
whether you had plans to expand the news hours: do you intend to do
that? And also, do you use other people to generate your news, or
do you create your own content?
|
|
[8]
Mr Curtis: Okay,
yes—I probably didn’t finish the answer to your first
question. Reading the evidence presented to the committee, we
noticed that ITV Wales, in their 10-year licence, have to produce
five and a half hours a day of programming. We have to
produce—. Sorry, it’s five and a half hours a week of
programming. We have to produce 17.5 hours of programming under our
licence. We find this pretty hard to meet, and we’ve appealed
to Ofcom to reduce our commitment to seven and a half hours a week.
The reason for this is, firstly, the economic conditions where
we’re trading aren’t such to give us a good enough
advertising revenue to meet that commitment. And also, the money
that we’ve receive as a start-up in broadcasting from the BBC
reduces year on year, and other expenditure we expected to
continue, mostly in the form of a programme called Digital Nation,
which provided us with a monthly revenue of £4,000 a month,
has ceased, which meant that we’ve had to lose two
journalists in our first year, and so we’ve had to reduce our
news output at the moment to an hour at lunchtime and half an hour
at teatime.
|
|
[9]
Bethan Jenkins:
Felly, rydych chi’n dweud eich
bod chi’n gofyn i leihau’r oriau oherwydd y cyfyngiadau
ariannol. Petasai yna ddim cyfyngiadau ariannol, a fyddech chi
eisiau naill ai aros fel rydych chi neu ehangu ar hynny? Rydych
chi’n dweud eich bod chi wedi apelio am y rhesymau ariannol
yn hytrach na—. Yn ITV, rwy’n credu y byddai am resymau
gwahanol i chi, o ran yr oriau a’r contract gydag
Ofcom.
|
Bethan Jenkins: So, you’re
saying that you’re asking to reduce the number of hours
because of the financial restrictions. If those financial
constraints weren’t there, would you want to stay as you are
or expand on that? You’re saying that you have appealed for
financial reasons rather than—. With ITV, it would have been
for different reasons to you, because of the hours and the contract
and so forth with Ofcom.
|
|
[10]
Mr Curtis: Yes. We find
that we’re unable, as a company, to meet the commitment.
We’re doing our best to meet that commitment, but in the long
run that won’t be possible, so we’ve gone to Ofcom and
appealed against the hours that we’re broadcasting. We
haven’t had an answer yet.
|
|
[11]
Bethan Jenkins: Thanks.
Jeremy Miles wants to ask a question.
|
|
[12]
Jeremy Miles:
Can I just explore that a bit
further? Because the reason that the stipulation exists in the ITV
licence is because it’s a public service broadcaster and
there are implications that go with that. I don’t believe
it’s the case that most broadcasters would have that
stipulation. What was the rationale for there being a floor, if you
like?
|
|
09:45
|
|
[13]
Mr Curtis: Well, we said we could do that in the beginning.
We thought that the commercial outlook in the Swansea bay region
would provide advertising revenue and other revenues, like
sponsorship, to enable us to do this. But, unfortunately, the
people who originally put forward that proposal are now deceased.
Of course, we lost our founder, Edward Townsend, right at the
beginning of the process to set up the station. And, sadly, we lost
Rhodri Morgan, the former First Minister, who was on our board as
well—Rhodri was non-exec.
|
|
[14]
Jeremy Miles: So, it’s not an Ofcom-driven
stipulation; it’s one that you, essentially, described as
being part of the licence, and they signed off on it, more or less.
So, your expectation would be that they’d be flexible on that
over time.
|
|
[15]
Mr Curtis: Yes. They visited us last week on
Wednesday—the fourteenth—and I think they were
impressed with what they saw and the quality of our product. I
think they understand the problems that we’re having.
|
|
[16]
Jeremy Miles: Okay, thanks.
|
|
[17]
Bethan Jenkins: Y cwestiwn
olaf gen i yw: a ydych chi’n credu bod dirywiad
newyddiaduraeth lleol wedi effeithio arnoch chi? A oes gennych chi
farn ynglŷn â hynny, yn gyffredinol, hefyd?
|
Bethan
Jenkins: My final question is: do you think that the decline in
local news journalism in Wales has impacted upon you? Do you have a
view on that, in general, also?
|
|
[18]
Mr Curtis: Well, I think as far as traditional news
gathering in Wales, the Titanic’s hit the iceberg, and
you’re going to hear from a lot of people like me who are
going to tell you what a great job we’re doing and
rearranging the deckchairs, to be honest. It’s not as it
seems. If you had to have a model, if we didn’t start from
here, I would look to Scotland, where BBC Scotland is a vibrant
channel. On top of that, the Government—the BBC has just
given Scotland a second channel, which I find inexplicable. And
there’s STV, another vibrant channel. They control the local
television stations as well in Scotland. What a good system that
would be if that was in Wales as well. But it’s obviously not
Scotland, and that’s not where we are. I’m very
disappointed that the standards that were there when I started as a
young journalist in the 1970s are not to be seen today. There is no
competition in local newspapers; they’re owned by Trinity
Mirror. Even the most successful newspaper in Wales, the South
Wales Evening Post, has now lost that title to the Daily
Post, which is a Trinity product as well. I can’t see
that the television channels in Wales—and I’m not
talking about Bay TV; I’m talking about the BBC and
ITV—are sufficiently resourced to produce excellence in
journalism. What they do is great, but they can’t do it with
the money they’re getting. I’m saying that as a tv
insider; I’m not privy to their finances, but television is
an expensive business. You have to, sometimes, chuck the money at
it to make it work properly. I cannot see that that’s
happening here. I think the BBC in Wales must be terribly
under-resourced and should be producing much more.
|
|
[19]
Bethan Jenkins:
Diolch. Carwyn.
|
Bethan Jenkins: Thank you. Carwyn.
|
|
[20]
Mr Evans: Rydw i’n credu mai un peth, fel
newyddiadurwr, yw ei bod hi’n anodd gweithio i’r
cyfyngderau sydd ar gael. Mae newyddion lleol, rydw i’n
credu, yn rhywbeth lle mae angen mwy o bwyslais arno fe, achos yn
amlwg, nid yw pawb yng Nghymru am glywed am beth sy’n digwydd
yng Nghaerdydd achos dim ond canran o bobl Cymru sy’n byw
yna. Wedyn rydw i’n credu mae yna gyfle i deledu lleol
weithio, ond mae angen yr amser a’r gefnogaeth arno fe i
ffynnu i’r uchderau y mae’n gallu gwneud gydag
amser.
|
Mr
Evans: As a journalist, it’s difficult to work within the
restrictions currently in place. Local news is something that needs
more emphasis because, clearly, not everyone in Wales wants to hear
about what’s happening in Cardiff, because there’s only
a percentage of the population of Wales living there. So, there is
an opportunity for local tv to work, but I do think that it needs
the time and the support to prosper and to reach the heights that
it can achieve in time.
|
|
[21]
Bethan Jenkins:
Diolch. Mae gan Dawn Bowden gwpwl o
gwestiynau.
|
Bethan
Jenkins: Thank you. Dawn Bowden has some questions.
|
|
[22]
Dawn Bowden: Thank you, Chair. Can you tell me a little bit
about the extent to which you distribute your news content through
social media, and whether that presents any particular barriers for
you?
|
|
[23]
Mr Curtis: No barriers; totally opportunities. That’s
the big surprise that we’ve discovered since we started
almost a year ago. As soon as Facebook started live streaming, it
opened the door to a whole new world of television, and not just
for us, but for every community in Wales. The entry level would be,
‘Buy an iPhone 7’, but if you had £100,000 to
spend, you could be putting output in technical quality as well as
any broadcaster. So, this means that, in terms of what used to be
the papurau bro—because every community could have its
own tv station broadcast on Facebook. And, obviously, there’s
the risk of defamation and all those sorts of things, but if this
system could be controlled by Ofcom and be made to adhere to Ofcom
standards, it’s a great opportunity for the nation to talk to
itself and for communities to get closer together.
|
|
[24]
Dawn Bowden: Sorry, Carwyn, did you want to say
something?
|
|
[25]
Mr Evans: No—[Inaudible.]
|
|
[26]
Dawn Bowden: Okay. That’s fine. So, you’re not
actually broadcasting via social media at the moment, are you?
|
|
[27]
Mr Curtis: Yes. Yes, we are.
|
|
[28]
Dawn Bowden: Oh, you are doing. Okay.
|
|
[29]
Mr Curtis: Yes. We started broadcasting on Facebook, as well
as our digital terrestrial television, our transmitter, as soon as
we could because, to be quite frank, the transmitter in Swansea, on
Kilvey Hill, is a waste of time. We all know that Swansea is a city
of seven hills and seven miles, and the sad fact is that, within
300m of the transmitter, people in St Thomas can’t pick us
up. The people in Oystermouth and Mumbles can’t see us
because they’ve got no view of the transmitter. The people in
north Gower can’t see us because they look to Carmel. In
Oystermouth—obviously, people all have Sky, but in the old
days they used to point towards the Mendip transmitter, and
that’s the case. So, you really need, as a business model, to
be on Sky. Now, unfortunately, we don’t have the
£120,000 a year, because we don’t have the advertising
revenue, to get on Sky. Our colleagues here from Made in Cardiff
do, and so they’re filling our space on Sky in Swansea. If
you click on your Sky thing, you’ll see Made in Cardiff, but
that goes through the whole of Wales, and I think Ofcom agree with
us that that’s not really fair and that needs addressing.
|
|
[30]
But we’re broadcasting on the internet—it’s on
Facebook. It gives you the opportunity to actually know who your
viewers are individually, and we know that our viewership is 50/50
male/female split. On Facebook we have, since we started, nearly 3
million individual viewers who watch Bay TV Swansea around the
world. Now, we don’t have a licence to broadcast around the
world, but when we first clicked on the ‘UK only’
button it didn’t work. So, we’ve now migrated to
YouTube. We’re talking about linear broadcasting—live
broadcasting. We don’t have the licence to do that. So, we
broadcast now on YouTube, our live streaming, which has solved that
problem, and then we take chunks of our broadcast and we put it
back on Facebook, and we’ve had some remarkable results.
Non-linear—just yesterday we put on a story about a school,
which was in Coedffranc—
|
|
[31]
Mr Evans: Coedffranc primary.
|
|
[32]
Mr Curtis: Yes, who’ve had a book week. Now, this is
not going to set the heather on fire, as they say in Swansea, but
for the local community it’s a huge thing. I think this
morning we woke up—. We put it on at 04:46 last night and we
woke up this morning to discover—what was it, 3,700?
|
|
[33]
Mr Evans: Yes—[Inaudible.]
|
|
[34]
Mr Curtis: Around 3,500 or 3,700 people have watched the
broadcast, and it’ll build up during the day. With linear
broadcasting on Facebook, we had a—. I think it was 24 April.
There was an incident in Swansea where there’d been a bomb
hoax the day before, and they thought there was a suspect device in
a bin outside the magistrates’ court. Our studios are next
door to the magistrates’ court, so we quickly got online and
started broadcasting. Within 10 minutes we had 2,000 people
watching live on a local TV station. By the end of the day I think
it was 9,700 people who’d watched that broadcast in catch-up,
and 30,000 people had seen the news alert for Swansea. We know who
they are; we know their demographics. It’s a brilliant
tool—Facebook Live.
|
|
[35]
Dawn Bowden: So, do you see that as the future
for—
|
|
[36]
Mr Curtis: Not just the future for—
|
|
[37]
Dawn Bowden: —your organisation?
|
|
[38]
Mr Curtis: Well, I would have thought that—.
I’ve been looking at the BBC’s Facebook page today, and
what they do is they direct people from Facebook to BBC online, the
iPlayer, where you actually have to now sort of sign your life away
to get on and admit that you do have a television licence. So, yes,
I really do believe that online broadcasting is the future of all
broadcasting. If it wasn’t for Sky being there already,
that’s the route they would probably go. It would be
broadband-driven. So, Wales has got a great disadvantage as we
start because we don’t have the sort of 4G capable broadband
over the whole nation to give us a national TV channel of people
doing their own television.
|
|
[39]
Dawn Bowden: That’s very interesting.
|
|
[40]
Bethan Jenkins: Sorry, Dawn, can just Lee come in
quickly?
|
|
[41]
Dawn Bowden: Yes, sure.
|
|
[42]
Bethan Jenkins: We’ll come back to you. Is that all
right?
|
|
[43]
Dawn Bowden: It is, yes.
|
|
[44]
Lee Waters: So, given that the entry barriers have been
taken away and there’s now a platform for you to broadcast
on, then what’s the point of your licence?
|
|
[45]
Mr Curtis: Yes.
|
|
[46]
Lee Waters: There’s no point in licences.
|
|
[47]
Mr Curtis: Well, given my life again, I wouldn’t have
done it this way, but I don’t think anybody was aware that
Facebook would start offering television free to the nation.
|
|
[48]
Lee Waters: So, there’s nothing to stop you just
handing your licence back and just carrying on on Facebook?
|
|
[49]
Mr Curtis: I think there’s a lot to stop us handing it
back, because it’s a valuable commodity.
|
|
[50]
Lee Waters: How?
|
|
[51]
Mr Curtis: In terms of anybody’s future aspirations of
providing a satellite-based station for the whole of Wales. If my
colleague from Made in Cardiff was here, he might say, ‘We
would really like to buy or acquire Bay TV Swansea, because then we
can continue with our Sky platform, which is the money.’
Because, if you think about it, we’ve got firms
like—what’s the Llantrisant-based firm? Leekes of
Llantrisant. They’re in parts of England just across the
border and they’re also in Crosshands, which is in our area.
So, if I were to go to Leekes and say, ‘I would like you to
advertise on our channel and it’ll cost you £450 for
100 20-second adverts’, which is a bargain to anybody, they
would say to us, ‘Well, why should I do that? We could
advertise on Made in Cardiff and have them on the Sky platform and
reach the whole of Wales for whatever their rate is.’ So,
that’s my commercial disadvantage that I can’t beat and
break, but that wasn’t apparent in the beginning. But had
Facebook been there—and I’m not a director of the
company—and had the director sat down at a table, knowing
what we know now, he would’ve applied for the licence of
Swansea.
|
|
[52]
But first of all, the Kilvey Hill transmitter, even after the 700
kHz clearances, which will improve our coverage, is a pretty
useless piece of kit. If we had Carmel as well, then that would
make a better situation, but we’d also need to be on Wenvoe
to get people in Pyle and Kenfig and all that sort of area to watch
our channel. So, giving us the channel at the time when this
legislation was mooted by the Department for Culture, Media and
Sport, was a good idea, but this is a fast-moving age where nothing
stands still in the super highway. And so, if we were starting from
here, you’re right.
|
|
[53]
I was reading the Institute of Welsh Affairs’s media
review—was it two years ago now in 2015—and you can see
how that has aged, and that’s the time that we come from. We
come from 2015 when you said that the Swansea and the Mold stations
hadn’t been taken up yet. Well, now they have—Mold is
Made in North Wales and we’re Bay TV Swansea. But as I put in
my paper to the committee, in an ideal world now, we’d be
Made in Wales and we could take the place of that—what you
haven’t got is the second BBC channel, as in Scotland. You
haven’t got that for Wales.
|
|
[54]
Bethan Jenkins: Just to say back to you, though, the concept
wasn’t supposed to be a national concept of Made in Wales, it
was supposed to be about filling that local gap, so wouldn’t
that take away from what the intention was?
|
|
[55]
Mr Curtis: Yes, you’re right, but if you look across
the array of the 22 or 23 local tv stations in the UK, you’ve
got London Live with more viewers than Sky Atlantic, where they
take £0.5 million in advertising revenue a month and
they’re still losing money, you have places that are as flat
as a pancake with one transmitter that can reach 2 or 3 million,
and they’re not making any money, and then you have Swansea,
where they should never ever have put it out to franchise, because
of the geographical positions, or they should’ve said,
‘Okay, you can have two or three transmitters. Which ones
would you like?’ That’s where we are now. But, yes,
you’re right. Give me my time again, and if I had Facebook
broadcasting, I would be out there. Nobody would be broadcasting on
the Swansea transmitter and we would be using Facebook to
broadcast.
|
|
[56]
Bethan Jenkins: Dawn.
|
|
[57]
Dawn Bowden: Can I just take you back to news provision and
the stuff you were talking about earlier, Carwyn? You talked about
the need for local news, but I was just wondering whether you
collaborate with the hyperlocal news providers for content and
distribution.
|
|
[58]
Mr Evans: Yes, the content we get, we get via local
communication channels and people are now phoning Bay TV with
stories, where, I think at the start, it was hard for us to find
stories, but now stories are coming to us. We try and make it as
local as possible. Obviously, if there are national events, we try
and put a local spin on that and make it relevant to the people of
Swansea, Llanelli or Neath, or wherever we can get a representative
of the relative organisation to talk then.
|
|
10:00
|
|
[59]
Dawn Bowden: So, people are coming to you with news, as well
as you going out and finding it.
|
|
[60]
Mr Evans: Yes.
|
|
[61]
Dawn Bowden: Are you working with some of the hyperlocal
organisations, as well?
|
|
[62]
Mr Curtis: Just yesterday, on the lunchtime show, we
introduced our viewers to Llanelli Online, which is Alun Evans and
his team. These are professional, top-class journalists. They set
up their own internet websites, transmitting in linear and in
non-linear forms, and we co-operated with them for the general
election campaign, of which we think our coverage was pretty well
successful. Also, for the local government elections before that,
it was the first time that every local council result in Swansea
had been filmed live, so we’re very proud of that.
|
|
[63]
But, yes, I believe that hyperlocal newsgathering is another growth
area that we’re just going to see explode, and some method
needs to be put together, so almost like a press association for
Wales, where they can contribute into a centre hub and take it away
again, free of charge. That would obviously need some support to
set it up and keep it going, but it’s exactly the sort of
thing that the BBC, in their submission, are talking about with
their news hub, which is quite restrictive to broadcasters like me,
and their local democracy reporters. The problem with their move
is, first of all, these hubs and reporters are going to produce
multimedia copy, so they’re going to produce vision—the
only people who are restricted from using it are the local
television stations. The irony is that these reporters could be
based in a local television station, because there are 11 for the
whole of Wales, which are going to allegedly increase the reporting
of democracy in Wales. I noticed that Leighton Andrews suggested
that you have your own reporter. I basically question what the BBC
are doing. If it’s going to cost them £9 million to do
this, well, let’s spend it on BBC Wales. Give them more money
to produce more good news programmes.
|
|
[64]
Bethan Jenkins: Hannah.
|
|
[65]
Hannah Blythyn: Thanks, Chair. If I can just take you back
and build on what you said about this idea of local community
channels via social media and Facebook, you touched on what the
challenges would be, at the moment, in terms of the legal
complications around it, fake news and the risks of defamation. If
you’d be able to expand on that and how you could tackle
that, but also what level of support would be needed to make that a
reality.
|
|
[66]
Mr Curtis: I would think that you should address that
question to someone like Llanelli Online, because they’re
living it at the moment. But if you ask me to speculate, I would
say that if three or four or five local people got together and
decided to do this, if there was a sort of guide produced, perhaps
by the Assembly, to how to do it and the technology they would
need—I think you’re talking about the entry level being
a few thousand pounds or less, and, as I said, if you want to be a
professional broadcaster, £100,000 buys you a virtual BBC
nowadays. Bay TV’s equipment is probably valued at something
like that. Then you need premises, that can be a hard bit, but you
could use the local library, if you’ve still got one, to do
it or a school—a primary school. Every community in Wales has
a story to tell. Every community in Wales has its local
storytellers, stars and would-be journalists. We just need to go
out and harvest it.
|
|
[67]
Hannah Blythyn: So, you think the hyperlocal news sites
could be part of that network as well.
|
|
[68]
Mr Curtis: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what it
is.
|
|
[69]
Hannah Blythyn: I think you also went further in your
paper—you talked about investigating the possibility of a
network of locally based not-for-profit community
organisations.
|
|
[70]
Mr Curtis: Yes, that would be them.
|
|
[71]
Bethan Jenkins: That’s the same thing.
|
|
[72]
Mr Curtis: That’s the thing, yes.
|
|
[73]
Bethan Jenkins: Suzy.
|
|
[74]
Suzy Davies: I just wanted to take you back to something you
said right at the beginning, which is that the journalists that
you’re seeing coming through now aren’t the same as
the—or don’t have the same qualities, if I can put it
like that, as the journalists of your own era. It sounds a little
bit mean, I don’t know. [Laughter.] ‘Era’
sounds terrible, sorry. But there’s an important question
here, because if you’re advocating the proliferation of
do-it-yourself channels, one of the
things we’re investigating is whether there’s been any
change in the quality of journalism, and while it would be, of
course, completely possible, for the reasons that you say, for
everyone to have a go at this, we are still interested in quality
journalism. I was going to ask you how many qualified journalists
you have in Bay TV, but you might know more generally in the
sector.
|
|
[75]
Mr Curtis: Can I address my age first?
[Laughter.]
|
|
[76]
Suzy Davies: Well, I suspect we’re not very far away from
each other, so I’m getting myself on this as well.
|
|
[77]
Mr Curtis: I don’t believe that for a second. Basically,
I’m not of the Jeremy Bowen era. I’m of his
dad’s, Gareth Bowen’s. So, hands up, I admit it, and
everything, when we look back, always looked better in our days.
But, if I can give you an example, when I trained as a
journalist—I started journalism at the age of 15, and I then
became an indentured journalist with the Western Mail & Echo
Ltd, part of the Thomson international organisation. Then, you had
to do a three or four-year indenture, like an apprenticeship, and,
in those years, you passed your shorthand, your
administration—the Welsh Assembly didn’t exist then, so
local councils and how it all works—you did a law exam, and
there were other modules as well. They weren’t called modules
in those days. Now, for £450 online, you can get the same
qualification, and you have to learn shorthand somewhere along the
way. I find that shocking, and if journalism—if that’s
the entry level of having a qualification, then there’s
something wrong in the state of Denmark.
|
|
[78]
Suzy Davies: So, you’re not seeing people coming through,
say, Cardiff school of journalism, for example, as the main
route.
|
|
[79]
Mr Curtis: That’s their route, I—
|
|
[80]
Suzy Davies: It’s not £450, surely.
|
|
[81]
Mr Curtis: That was there in our day, but the people who were
teaching then—and this is no criticism intended of anybody
who’s there at all now—they were people from my
generation, who came up the hard way. I was trained as a
journalist—and this sounds terrible—by George Phillips,
who was the same guy who trained Michael Parkinson. He was here in
Cardiff, teaching us in the local Thomson training centre, because
the newspaper groups had their own training centres in those days,
and so you had the best people training, and it wasn’t an
academic-based, it was a workplace-based—. In those days,
there were coal mines, and there was no way a journalist was going
to be sent out into the Rhondda valley to report on something
unless he’d been in a mine. So, we were sent down the
mines—
|
|
[82]
Suzy Davies: Okay. I don’t want to take—
|
|
[83]
Mr Curtis: —for a shift just to see what the local people
were enduring. There’s nothing worse than someone sailing
down from Oxford or Cambridge and having no idea what Wales was
like and then going out and interviewing people.
|
|
[84]
Suzy Davies: Okay. Thank you. As I say, I don’t want to take
any more time on this particular strand, but I am curious about
this. Thank you, anyway.
|
|
[85]
Bethan Jenkins:
Thank you.
|
|
[86]
Hannah Blythyn:
Coming back on what Carwyn said earlier,
the other side of the coin, really, to what Suzy just asked is
that, if it looks like we’re shifting towards this new way of
getting the news out there of hyperlocal sites, using social media,
how do we make sure of the other side, of making sure that
we’ve got quality journalism, and also how it is a viable and
sustainable career option for young people—how do we tie that
in with how the news, the picture of how we consume our news, is
changing?
|
|
[87]
Mr Curtis: Okay. Well, Carwyn has just been through that system,
because there is a big age gap. You might not have realised it, but
there is. [Laughter.]
|
|
[88]
Dai Lloyd: Is there? [Laughter.]
|
|
[89]
Mr Curtis: So, if you can talk us through that; you came through
that.
|
|
[90]
Mr Evans: Yes, so I studied a postgraduate diploma in
Nottingham Trent University in broadcast journalism, and I do think
there is a need for that, because it teaches you, obviously, the
law side of broadcasting, but also the whole news gathering and
getting out there and dealing with difficult stories. As important
as hyperlocal news is, there are some stories that I think you need
to be guided in how to deal with them, because they’re very
sensitive and they’re of a nature where I think—you
can’t just turn up with a camera and start interviewing a
mother who’s lost her child, or something like that. There
are certain topics in news for which training is needed to ensure
that you have the right empathy to deal with that
situation.
|
|
[91]
Hannah Blythyn:
Just, sorry, one very, very quick—.
Just on that, though, in terms of—. So, you think, you know,
in terms of you’d like to see postgraduate broadcast
journalism, perhaps now if you’re looking more to—and
it might already be the case, but if you’re looking more to
how you have to set up these networks, and perhaps some of the
skills are going to be different—. So, Peter, in your
previous answer, you referred to needing guidance on how to do
this. Should that be something that’s taught as part of
courses, in terms of journalism courses in the future, about how
you’d get that guidance as part of a course, and how you
could create these networks? It’s almost a different set of
skills you need to learn as well at the same time.
|
|
[92]
Mr Evans: Yes, I think that could be something to be
introduced into the course, because, obviously, these days, jobs
are harder to find and sometimes you do need to take a chance,
maybe, and try and set something up. So, if you’ve got
experience of how to set something up and communicate with fellow
journalists in a local community, I think it would be beneficial
and it would also benefit the community and the community channel
that follows on from that.
|
|
[93]
Bethan Jenkins: Sorry, I don’t want to take much time,
but I think it was Ifan Morgan Jones who told us that he was
disappointed that the younger generation weren’t actually
setting up these things on their own—that there was a massive
gap in that sort of proactive start-up agenda. Is that something
that you concur with or that you can see?
|
|
[94]
Mr Curtis: I would hope that secondary schools in Wales
would be looking at setting up their own TV channel, because they
can.
|
|
[95]
Bethan Jenkins: Okay. Carry on, then—Dai Lloyd.
|
|
[96]
Dai Lloyd: Well, actually, Chair, my questions have been
overtaken by the excellence of the replies, really, so I’m
completely floored by the excellence of the presentation, but
anyway—. One point, though, in terms of the reality of where
we are in terms of news coverage in general about Wales, it
doesn’t actually prioritise things happening differently in
Wales vis-à-vis, say, England. And I was wondering about
your contribution towards that. Say, last year when junior doctors
in England were on strike, junior doctors in Swansea also thought
they were on strike, because that’s where most of their news
coverage came from. Now, that’s obviously difficult to
counter without an increased appreciation that things are different
here in Wales. I was just wondering, looking forward, about your
contribution to that.
|
|
[97]
Mr Curtis: I think it comes back to Leighton Andrews’s
point that you’ve got a responsibility to get the news out
from here, and if it’s not being covered properly or in
enough depth then that’s what this committee is looking
at.
|
|
[98]
Bethan Jenkins: Ocê. Jeremy, cyllid.
|
Bethan Jenkins: Okay. Jeremy, finance.
|
|
[99]
Jeremy Miles: I’ve got some questions about finance
and how that all works. What sort of budget do you operate to?
|
|
[100] Mr
Curtis: I’m not a director of the company, and I’m
not aware what—. I know in rough terms, but I honestly
don’t know what the figures are as to where we are at
present.
|
|
[101] Jeremy
Miles: What would your accounts show if I were to look at
those?
|
|
[102] Mr
Curtis: They’re available—
|
|
[103] Jeremy
Miles: A rough idea.
|
|
[104] Mr
Curtis: —in Companies House. I must admit I’ve been
so busy, I haven’t had the time—
|
|
[105] Jeremy
Miles: No, no, it’s fine; we can find that. So, in terms
of the financial support that you get as a company, as a
broadcaster, do you have a sense of what that is in terms
of—
|
|
[106] Mr
Curtis: I know how much the effects that the BBC’s lack
of support that we’re going to—. When we’re set
up, we’re given three years of funding, and the idea is that
in those three years we build our commercial model to a stage where
we won’t need the support of the BBC any longer. That
isn’t and never was a viable option, and now, as we go into
year 2, I’m £6,000 a month down on where I was in year
1. I don’t know the total amounts and what we’re
looking at in advertising revenue from mainstream advertising on
the channel, but that’s the well that we’re looking
down.
|
|
[107] Jeremy
Miles: Okay, just to get this clear in my head: you’ve
got a three-year commitment, so you’re in year 2 of that. So,
you’ve got—
|
|
[108] Mr
Curtis: Well, we’re just about to go into year 2.
|
|
[109] Jeremy
Miles: Right. So, you’ve got visibility of funding for
the next two years—
|
|
[110] Mr
Curtis: Yes, but it decreases year on year.
|
|
[111] Jeremy
Miles: —or someone has that. So, there is a decreasing
commitment, is there?
|
|
[112] Mr
Curtis: Yes, to wean you off the BBC support.
|
|
[113] Jeremy
Miles: Sure. And you don’t know the numbers in terms of
headline numbers, but do you know what the reduction rate is? Does
it halve over three years, or—?
|
|
[114] Mr
Curtis: I think in year 1 the BBC gave us—. Is it
£120,000, or was that—?
|
|
[115] Mr Evans:
I thought it was £160,000 in the first year.
|
|
[116] Mr
Curtis: It goes down by a percentage every year, so in year 3
it’s £80,000.
|
|
[117] Jeremy
Miles: Okay, so it goes from 100 per cent to 50 per cent,
starting from about £160,000 roughly.
|
|
[118] Mr
Curtis: I’m not sure if the £160,000 figure’s
right.
|
|
[119] Jeremy
Miles: Okay.
|
|
[120] Bethan
Jenkins: Sorry, can I just ask: if you’re not dealing
with the finance, who is, then? The chairman?
|
|
[121] Mr
Curtis: The directors and the chairman of the company, because
the reason why—
|
|
[122] Bethan
Jenkins: Can they give us the information?
|
|
[123] Mr
Curtis: Sorry?
|
|
[124] Bethan
Jenkins: Can they give us the information, as opposed to
us—
|
|
[125] Mr
Curtis: If you write to them, I’m sure they’ll
consider it, yes.
|
|
[126] Bethan
Jenkins: —going to Companies House? Okay.
|
|
[127] Mr
Curtis: The reason that Carwyn and I are here, rather than
having the chairman of the company, is that it’s about news
gathering, this inquiry. If it was about local television in
Wales—and there was an earlier inquiry that we missed out on,
somehow—he would have been here then and been very able and
willing to answer those questions.
|
|
10:15
|
|
[128] Jeremy
Miles: That’s fine. These are just questions about
resilience, essentially, and the model. Okay. So, the intention was
that, as you describe it, weaning you off the BBC money encouraged
you to find commercial alternatives to that, and your experience
has been, you’re telling us, that that is not happening, and
it was never likely to have happened under that model. Is that a
fair summary?
|
|
[129] Mr
Curtis: And I’m sure if my colleague from Made in Cardiff
was here, they might tell you of a similar, if not identical,
experience.
|
|
[130] Jeremy
Miles: Okay.
|
|
[131] Mr
Curtis: And, also, many of the others of the local television
channels that have started in the UK, and are now in year 3, have
had to become part of one of the major consortiums, either
‘That’s’ or ‘Made in’.
|
|
[132] Jeremy
Miles: Right. Because of financial vulnerability.
|
|
[133] Mr
Curtis: Because, yes, you come to the end of the BBC money and
you suddenly realise that you no longer have a viable business
model.
|
|
[134] Jeremy
Miles: Okay. So—
|
|
[135] Mr
Curtis: I don’t know the figures as regards Bay TV.
|
|
[136] Jeremy
Miles: Sure. Okay. So, are you saying, in effect, that the
commercial moneys that Bay TV is able to raise are negligible,
effectively? Is that fair? I don’t want to put words in your
mouth. Is that fair?
|
|
[137] Mr
Curtis: They were a surprise, the levels that we’re
getting.
|
|
[138] Jeremy
Miles: Because they’re so small?
|
|
[139] Mr
Curtis: Because they’re so small, yes.
|
|
[140] Jeremy
Miles: Yes. Okay. Right. So, it’s not sensible,
presumably, to talk about the percentages of your income that
derive—
|
|
[141] Mr
Curtis: No. And I don’t know those details anyway, but
what I do know is that the total advertising availability in Wales
is static or declining, and that you have your Trinity Mirror,
which are jealously guarding their revenue, and you have Nation
Radio and the others that are jealously guarding theirs. We could,
quite easily, if there was a viable broadcast unit, go in there,
and, as I said, for £450, you can get your 100 20-second
adverts on Bay TV. But you’ve actually got to have
measurement from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board,
and that is a very, very expensive thing indeed. And we’re
actually negotiating with them now, so we will come up with
audience figures that you can then sell advertising based on.
|
|
[142] Jeremy
Miles: Yes. Okay. But you’ve got your Facebook viewing
figures—
|
|
[143] Mr
Curtis: Oh, gosh, yes. Facebook, yes.
|
|
[144] Jeremy
Miles: You’ve got concrete data there.
|
|
[145] Mr
Curtis: Yes, we do.
|
|
[146] Jeremy
Miles: So, you’ve got the financial support from the BBC.
You’ve got some element of advertising revenue. Are there any
other revenue sources, or is that, essentially, it?
|
|
[147] Mr
Curtis: Yes, there are. There are, and it’s a good
question. Anybody who’s watched Bay TV will notice that we
broadcast five days a week, and at weekends, we turn into a film
channel, called Talking Pictures, which shows movies, good movies,
British movies, from the 1930s right until the year 2000. And they
are very, very popular with our viewers. The reason we do that is
because the people of Swansea, and, additionally, the people of
Brighton, cannot get channel 81, for some reason, on their
transmitters. So, this Talking Pictures channel needs us to get
their BARB figures for the whole of the UK, which they base their
advertising rates on, so they pay us to show these films.
|
|
[148] Jeremy
Miles: Okay. So, you have a slot share arrangement of some sort
with them.
|
|
[149] Mr
Curtis: Well, no, they pay us to show the films, so we actually
switch over to their feed. As part of the legislation that set up
local television, the Government also set up a mux, called Comux
UK, based in Birmingham, and we send our signal to Birmingham and
they send it back down. But that means that other signals, and, in
this case, channel 81, can be broadcast on channel 8, which is a
top 10 DTT channel.
|
|
[150] Jeremy
Miles: I think the detail is fine. I just want to get a sense
of the top line, really. So, is that a material contributor to your
revenue, did you say?
|
|
[151] Mr
Curtis: Yes. It’s a vital part of our—
|
|
[152] Jeremy
Miles: Okay. In rough percentage terms, would you—
|
|
[153] Mr
Curtis: I don’t know. I just know that that’s the
answer to the question. [Laughter.]
|
|
[154] Jeremy
Miles: Okay. So, in terms of long-term sustainability, I think
what is clear from what you’re saying is that your fear is
probably—again, I don’t want to put words in your
mouth—that, at the end of the BBC money, you’re looking
at a difficult situation.
|
|
[155] Mr
Curtis: No, I’m not. I have no fear. I believe that the
excellence of Bay TV and its people will attract investors, and
that we will move on with investment from a third party.
|
|
[156] Jeremy
Miles: So, why would your experience be different from those
that have been consolidated into ‘That’s’, and so
on?
|
|
[157] Mr
Curtis: Because we’re in year 1, and we have at least
another 12 months to prove our commercial model, to perhaps get,
with Ofcom’s help, onto Sky, or prevent other people taking
our slot in our postcode area, and also to develop our commercial
model. So, we’re not chucking in the towel. We’re going
out to fight for the people of Swansea.
|
|
[158] Jeremy
Miles: What I’m trying to get a sense of is what the
underlying considerations are. So, others have not succeeded in
doing that for what reason, would you say?
|
|
[159] Mr
Curtis: Because they started first and they didn’t
realise—. If you are starting a business in the commercial
world, the first thing you do is appoint a sales team. In local
television—wrong, because you will never pay for your sales
team, when you’re advertising in the first two years. What
you do is you build the brand and then you go to the marketplace
and say, ‘Hey, you’re paying x for advertising on The
Wave, or other competing brands or in the newspapers; we will give
you this and see how you get on and come back to us and tell us
whether we’ve improved your business’. So, that’s
where we’re going—taking our product to the market and
then trying to sell it.
|
|
[160] Jeremy
Miles: Okay, great. Thank you.
|
|
[161] Bethan
Jenkins: Lee.
|
|
[162] Lee
Waters: One of the things that we’re trying to establish
with this inquiry is whether there is a viable financial model for
the provision of news. I think, as you’ve described to date,
yours is not a viable financial model. Do you have a clear idea of
what a viable financial model would look like?
|
|
[163] Mr
Curtis: For our product or do you mean for any?—
|
|
[164] Lee
Waters: For news in Wales generally, but drawing on your own
experience.
|
|
[165] Mr
Curtis: From my own experience, I was news editor of the
Western Mail at a time when the circulation was
growing—
|
|
[166] Lee
Waters: Sorry, your experience of Bay TV Swansea, I mean. In
current market conditions, can you see a way forward to there being
a viable news model?
|
|
[167] Mr
Curtis: On the news side of things, yes. If Ofcom allow us to
broadcast seven and a half hours a week, we can continue with our
present staff for the foreseeable future.
|
|
[168] Lee
Waters: Yes, but that’s not viable though, is it, because
you don’t make any money?
|
|
[169] Mr
Curtis: It’s viable until the BBC money runs out.
|
|
[170] Lee
Waters: Right, but that’s not viable, because
that’s a subsidy—that’s going to stop. So, beyond
that, do you foresee, in current market conditions, a viable news
model emerging and what will it take for it to emerge?
|
|
[171] Mr
Curtis: More investment from a third party to actually
kick-start the brand being sold into the marketplace against the
likes of News International or News UK or whatever it’s
called nowadays. Rupert Murdoch has the radio stations, Trinity
Mirror have the newspapers, and here we are as, probably, the only
independently owned broadcaster in Wales. It’s tough, but
we’re not despondent: we won’t be giving up and we will
battle on because we’ve got very good people working for
us—young people straight from university, and they’re
actually working in the degree subject that they studied.
That’s incredible in today’s world.
|
|
[172] Lee
Waters: In terms of other support that you get, as well as the
direct subsidy form the BBC, do you have access to some of their
content as well?
|
|
[173] Mr
Curtis: No, they don’t offer us programmes to show,
no.
|
|
[174] Lee
Waters: You don’t have any access to any of their
content.
|
|
[175] Mr
Curtis: No, and, in fact, in their digital democracy reporter
programme, we’re actually precluded from using the vision. We
can use the text.
|
|
[176] Lee
Waters: Do you get any non-financial support from anybody at
all?
|
|
[177] Mr
Curtis: We get great help from people in the business and also
our cousins in the other 22 stations. So, on our start-up, without
their help, we wouldn’t have got on the air, because
they’ve given us free programmes and we get free programming
from other people who love local television. Some of the programmes
that we get offered and use are quite exceptional. We also produce
our own programmes. We’ve produced music programmes and we
produce a poetry show before the 6 o’clock news every night.
There are many other products that we’ve touched and, if they
work, we carry on. But we get a lot of support and a lot of
goodwill from the local community and also from our local
MPs—all but one appear on the show quite regularly, and
he’s promised to join us soon, and, I hope Dai Lloyd, if I
can address him directly, Chair, will come and be on Bay TV,
because I think you’re one of the few here, who’s in
our area, who hasn’t been on.
|
|
[178] Dai
Lloyd: I’m very shy. [Laughter.]
|
|
[179] Mr
Curtis: Yes, you’re very shy.
|
|
[180]
Bethan Jenkins:
Suzy.
|
|
[181]
Suzy Davies: You mentioned earlier on that you’re hoping
that Ofcom will reduce the number of news hours and current affairs
hours that you have to put out. You make an important claim that
S4C is not the only Welsh language terrestrial channel in Wales.
How much Welsh language news are you able to put out? You mentioned
a quarter of an hour earlier on, but is that because it’s
difficult to find people to contribute or because it’s just
you and you haven’t got time to do anything else?
|
|
[182]
Mr Evans: It’s probably a combination of both at the
moment. One of the main barriers is that, for instance, on Swansea
council, none of the cabinet speak Welsh, so, to get a Welsh
representative from Swansea
council is not always easy, but then—. For instance, this
week, with Coedffranc Primary School, we made an English-language
package and a completely different Welsh language package. So, we
try and broadcast a full 15 minutes of Welsh every day, but
obviously, sometimes, the top stories in the area for that day
don’t allow for that. But the hope is that we’ll get to
a point where every day is a full 15 minute Welsh language
bulletin.
|
|
[183]
Suzy Davies: So, you do back-to-back when you can,
effectively.
|
|
[184]
Mr Evans: We do back-to-back every day, but some of the
interviews in the Welsh bulletin might be English language due to a
lack of a Welsh speaker.
|
|
[185]
Suzy Davies: That’s my point, really—it’s just
that the individuals involved don’t have the language skills
to be able to contribute.
|
|
[186]
Mr Evans: Yes.
|
|
[187]
Suzy Davies: When I was asking earlier about journalists and how
many journalists you have, has it been difficult to attract
journalists with Welsh language skills or student journalists with
Welsh language skills.
|
|
[188]
Mr Curtis: Well, there aren’t a lot around, and we have
the best one here.
|
|
[189]
Suzy Davies: Well, exactly, I’m feeling slightly sorry for
you that you’ve got a lot standing on your own shoulders
here. So, in order to expand Welsh language news output, how do you
think it could be done, bearing in mind the resource implications
you’ve already mentioned?
|
|
[190]
Mr Curtis: Well, Welsh local government support, Government
support in some way, to boost our use of the Welsh language could
be good. In our licence, we’ve committed ourselves to do
Welsh language programming, but, in Swansea, the language
demographic is not the same as it is in Pontardawe, and, if we had
a good transmitter or we were on Sky, we could reach our audience
there. Because we have reports every week of people who hear about
the channel from their friends, go to their television set in
Pontardawe, where there’s a big Welsh-speaking community, and
they’ve been told about Carwyn’s news bulletin in
Welsh, and they can’t get it.
|
|
[191]
Suzy Davies: Okay.
|
|
[192]
Bethan Jenkins:
Can they can get it on
Facebook?
|
|
[193]
Mr Curtis: Do we put the Welsh language on Facebook?
|
|
[194]
Mr Evans: Yes. We don’t put full bulletins on it because
what we found is that people tend to prefer to watch shorter clips.
So, we put individual stories up and we put both Welsh and English
language stories up then.
|
|
[195]
Mr Curtis: As I said, that’s the way forward, the
generation—
|
|
[196]
Bethan Jenkins:
Do you put it on YouTube as
well—the Welsh language news?
|
|
[197]
Mr Curtis: Yes, they’re live on YouTube in
Welsh.
|
|
[198]
Bethan Jenkins:
So, they could watch it on
YouTube.
|
|
[199]
Mr Curtis: Yes.
|
|
[200]
Suzy Davies: Just one last quick one on this, things like the
local authorities and other public bodies like the health
boards—there would be stories coming from there as
well—do have the capacity to help you out with Welsh language
speakers and certainly Welsh language material full stop. Are they
proactively seeking you out on things like this?
|
|
[201]
Mr Curtis: If I could just say, we don’t have a very good
relationship with our local health board, for some reason. We
don’t understand why. They don’t recognise us as a
viable news outlet. I don’t think we’ve ever had an
interview from the health board.
|
|
[202]
Mr Evans: No, we’ve got a better relationship with the
Hywel Dda health board, further west.
|
|
[203]
Suzy Davies: That’s interesting. But I meant just more
generally really, any big organisation should be able to find a
Welsh speaker in order to contribute. I know it’s difficult
for you because you’re on your own, but they should be a
little bit—I wasn’t looking at you.
|
|
[204]
Mr Evans: I think Swansea council is probably the only one
where we haven’t had a Welsh speaker. The fire service and
the police are more than happy to give us bilingual speakers if
they’re available.
|
|
[205]
Suzy Davies: That’s what I was getting to. Okay, diolch.
Thank you.
|
|
[206]
Mr Curtis: I see the channel as open-access television. If a
Welsh language group contacted us and said, ‘We’d like
to talk about this and that’, and the same with any
politician, they could walk through the door and get on
television.
|
|
[207]
Suzy Davies: Careful what you wish for there.
|
|
[208]
Bethan Jenkins:
Quickly now, we have two more questions.
Neil Hamilton.
|
|
[209]
Neil Hamilton: You mentioned quite rightly that there’s a lack
of plurality with the Welsh media carved up between Trinity Mirror
on the one hand and the Murdoch empire on another. This point has
been made by Ifan Morgan Jones in his previous evidence to us in
relation to Welsh language media as well. Do you agree with that
and is there any way in which we can mitigate this? Given that
there’s a significant element of public subsidy in most Welsh
language media in Wales, I wonder whether there’s any way,
unlike something that is purely commercial, we could nudge or shift
the balance.
|
|
[210]
Mr Evans: Sorry—
|
|
[211]
Mr Curtis: You haven’t read the report.
|
|
[212]
Mr Evans: I haven’t, I’m afraid.
|
|
[213] Mr Curtis: I
think we’re at a certain disadvantage there. Could you
tell us a bit more about it?
|
|
10:30
|
|
[214] Neil
Hamilton: Well, about what?
|
|
[215] Mr
Curtis: The report.
|
|
[216] Bethan
Jenkins: The evidence from Ifan Morgan Jones, you mean?
|
|
[217] Neil
Hamilton: Yes, sorry, yes.
|
|
[218] Bethan
Jenkins: It’s evidence that he provided to the
committee.
|
|
[219] Neil
Hamilton: That was just one of our witnesses who came and,
obviously, we’re interested not just in the resilience of
existing institutions, but also in encouraging greater plurality
and greater choice.
|
|
[220] Mr
Curtis: Well, I would refer to my earlier answer about
hyperlocal stations. That’s the way, or another way would be
to look, if the Blaenplwyf transmitter was available to local
television and the others in the main Welsh-speaking areas, and in
north Wales, you could have a local television alternative to S4C,
if that’s the question that you’re
asking?
|
|
[221] Neil
Hamilton: Yes, well, it was along those lines, about your ideas
on how we can help greater plurality to develop.
|
|
[222] Mr
Curtis: I read most of the evidence before the committee and it
was the evidence from Dr Andy Williams which I felt the most
relevant, in my opinion.
|
|
[223] Bethan
Jenkins: Anything else?
|
|
[224] Neil
Hamilton: Well, do you want the last question? We’ve also
looked at Welsh language publications in written form too, and
those which are supported by the Welsh Books Council and how we get
a greater reach for these things. You mentioned earlier on a single
news hub for Wales. I was wondering whether you think that this
could also assist us in relation to printed publications as
well.
|
|
[225] Mr
Curtis: Well, the same as the day of the newspaper printed on
paper has gone, I’m pretty sure the day of the printed book
will go, and that’s where you could have a Welsh Books
Council hub, which was multimedia and talking books, and all those
various things. Anything’s possible if we can think of
it.
|
|
[226] Bethan
Jenkins: Okay, I’m going to bring it to an end because we
have gone over substantially, because, obviously, we started late.
I thank you for coming in today, and if you do have anything to add
then please feel free to contact us at any time. Hopefully,
we’ll see some of the clips from the committee on Bay TV
Swansea or on your Facebook page later on.
|
|
[227]
Diolch yn fawr iawn am ddod mewn a
gobeithio y gwnawn ni gysylltu gyda chi yn y dyfodol ynglŷn
â’r ymchwiliad yma, wrth gwrs. Diolch yn
fawr.
|
Thank you very
much for coming in and I hope we’ll be in touch with you in
the future regarding this inquiry, of course. Thank you.
|
|
[228] Mr
Curtis: Thank you for having us.
|
|
[229] Bethan
Jenkins: Pleasure. We’ll take a short, short two-minute
break.
|
|
Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 10:32 a 10:40.
The
meeting adjourned between 10:32 a 10:40.
|
|
Newyddiaduraeth Newyddion yng Nghymru: Sesiwn
Dystiolaeth 6
News Journalism in Wales: Evidence Session 6
|
|
[230] Bethan
Jenkins: Diolch a chroeso.
Rŷm ni’n symud ymlaen at eitem 3, sef newyddiaduraeth
newyddion yng Nghymru a sesiwn dystiolaeth 6. Croeso i Phil
Henfrey, pennaeth newyddion a rhaglenni ITV Cymru Wales a Zoe
Thomas, golygydd cynnwys ITV News Cymru—mae’n ddrwg gen
i, ITV News Cymru Wales; lot o ddisgrifiadau gwahanol. Diolch i chi
am ddod mewn yma heddiw fel rhan o’r ymchwiliad yma. Fel
rydych chi’n ei wybod o fod yma o’r blaen, bydd
cwestiynau ar wahanol themâu gan Aelodau Cynulliad. Rwyf jest
eisiau dechrau gyda’r cwestiwn ynghylch eich barn chi am
ddirywiad cyffredinol newyddion yng Nghymru a sut mae hynny wedi
effeithio arnoch chi. A ydych chi’n credu bod yna ddirywiad
wedi bod yn hynny o beth a sut mae hynny wedi effeithio ar ITV
Cymru Wales? [Torri ar draws.]
|
Bethan
Jenkins: Thank you very much and welcome. We move on now to
item 3 on journalism in Wales, evidence session 6. I welcome Phil
Henfrey, head of news and programmes, ITV Wales, and Zoe Thomas,
content editor, ITV News Wales—ITV News Cymru Wales. There
are a lot of different descriptions. Thanks for coming today as
part of this inquiry. As you know, having been here before,
there’ll be questions on different themes from Assembly
Members. I just want to start with a question on your opinion about
the general decline of news journalism in Wales and how that has
impacted on you and whether there has been a decline in your
opinion and how that has affected ITV Cymru Wales.
[Interruption.]
|
|
[231] Bethan
Jenkins: I expect you to answer. [Laughter.]
|
|
[232] Mr
Henfrey: What was the question?
|
|
[233] Bethan
Jenkins: I was asking about the—. I did not realise that
at all. What is it in English? The decline in Welsh media and
whether you agreed that there had been a decline and whether you
could tell us how that’s affected ITV Cymru Wales.
|
|
[234] Mr
Henfrey: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to
you again. I completely understand that the backdrop for the
question is around the decline in the Welsh media. I think
probably, though, I’ll start by, for the record, saying that
what ITV Wales does, and what ITV Wales has done for many decades,
it continues to do. It continues to provide a national news service
for Wales—a very successful, high-quality national news
service for Wales. It’s one that is available free to
viewers. It’s universally available. It provides effective
competition to the BBC’s news services in Wales and it does
so at no direct cost to the taxpayer.
|
|
[235] As I say,
we’ve been doing it for many decades, but it continues to be
hugely relevant to a significant proportion of the audience in
Wales as well. I think the last Ofcom survey said that 78 per cent
of people in Wales trusted what ITV news does in Wales, which is a
significant figure. As I’ve said to you before, the ratings
for our flagship news programme, Wales at Six, have actually
gone up every year since 2009.
|
|
[236] But, of course,
the world isn’t standing still—it’s
not—audience behaviours are not standing still,
technology’s not standing still, the political and economic
climate in which we operate is not standing still, and ITV news has
not been standing still within all of that. I think one of the
reasons for our current success, if I could put it in those terms,
is as much to do with the talents and the skills of our team,
who’ve absolutely embraced the changes that have come across
our industry in terms of technology. We’ve also changed our
programming. I think that you will know, from having watched
Wales at Six in recent years, that, by going to a
single-presenter format, we’ve re-established its credentials
as a national programme for Wales, as an authoritative programme
for Wales—and the relationship with the audience—and
the audience has responded to that. Of course, we embrace the
benefits of the internet—for there are some benefits to the
internet—in the sense that we can now reach new audiences via
our mobile and our digital.
|
|
[237] So, yes, the
wider news environment in Wales is going through significant
change, but I think what I’m keen to do is to say, within
that, what ITV Wales does is consistent with what ITV Wales, in the
news context, has been doing for many decades and will continue to
do for the duration of the licence.
|
|
10:45
|
|
[238]
There are two aspects, I would argue, in terms of the impact of the
wider context of the news industry. The first one is—as
somebody who works in the news industry, then any decline in the
number of journalists, in the plurality of
coverage in Wales, is of a concern. And there are also some
practicalities, too, in terms of what we do. If I could say,
it’s somewhat like a food chain of news stories, and our
focus in terms of what we do has not changed. We focus on the
national institutions of Wales. We are a television news programme;
there’s only so many stories we can cover, and the amount of
television news in 30 minutes you can put in is much the same as it
was 20 years ago. But I think what is changing is the ability of
news journalists across Wales to provide sufficient scrutiny of all
these institutions of Wales wherever they may be. And I think that
is probably of concern. And then a second aspect to that as
well—we can go into much more detail on that one—is a
question I ask myself, ‘Where do the future journalists come
from?’ I started myself in local newspapers, and I worked my
way, in a sense, through the industry and learnt a lot along the
way, before I came into television. And, as those sources of other
providers start to decline, a question I start to ask myself is,
‘Well, where are the journalists of the future going to come
from to keep the people of Wales informed?’ So, that’s
probably my broad sort of answer: what ITV Wales does is fairly
consistent with what it’s always done in the news environment
in Wales. Indeed, I think there’s probably a case for saying
it’s doing it as well as it has ever done. But the
practicalities of the relative decline, and changes
that are going on in the industry, do have some practical impacts
on what we do day to day.
|
|
[239]
Bethan Jenkins:
Zoe, a oes gennych chi rywbeth
i’w ychwanegu neu—?
|
Bethan Jenkins: Zoe, do you have anything to add?
|
|
[240] Ms
Thomas: Sorry—
|
|
[241]
Bethan Jenkins:
Zoe, a oes gennych chi rywbeth
i’w ychwanegu neu—?
|
Bethan Jenkins: Zoe, do you have anything to add?
|
|
[242] Ms
Thomas: I think—. Well, I agree with Phil. I think, on a
practical level, my job most days is to look around and decide what
stories we should be covering and I think, without doubt, when I
started doing that job 12 years ago, there was a greater source of
stories out there being generated a greater number of journalists,
and that probably can only be a bad thing, that that isn’t
out there in the numbers, although the people that are out there
are still doing a fantastic job. And I think—you know, that
is a give-and-take relationship, I’m sure. We used to get
stories from local newspapers, and, similarly, they saw stuff on
our news, and they would pick up on that as well. So, I think that
has declined, there’s no doubt about that. I think the
websites now that the local newspapers are providing are doing
their best to plug that gap. But I think, inevitably, the number of
journalists out there has decreased and therefore the scrutiny of
things at the local councils, et cetera, is still there, but
it’s perhaps not there in the same way that it was. And that
was something that, really, national broadcasters never necessarily
had the chance to do, as Phil said, in the finite airtime that we
had. So, that’s a very difficult gap to plug,
unfortunately.
|
|
[243] Bethan
Jenkins: Neil Hamilton.
|
|
[244] Neil
Hamilton: I was wondering whether you could give us your views
on whether there are any distinctly Welsh aspects to this decline
in news journalism. The Ofcom advisory committee has been
particularly scathing about the position of Wales, saying
we’re much worse served than any of the
nations—Scotland and northern Ireland, in particular. Outside
the BBC we’re served less comprehensively, they say, than any
of them, and we have weaker print media and commercial radio
services than they have as well. So, it’s a pretty damning
indictment of the situation. Is there anything we can do about
this?
|
|
[245] Mr
Henfrey: Is anything we can do? In that sense it’s not a
new phenomenon, but, if you start from a weak base, if that base
then starts to get weaker, then the impacts perhaps are more keenly
felt. I’m no expert on the newspaper industry, or indeed the
economics of radio, but, ultimately, this is an issue of economics.
Wales, relative to other parts of the UK, is a smaller economy. It
has fewer people, fewer news consumers. So, that has an impact. I
think that there’s also an element too that says to what
degree are people in Wales—how can I put his—not
willing to consume, but how interested are they in purely Welsh
content.
|
|
[246] I would
argue—I have no research to back this up, but I would say
that interest in purely Welsh affairs has gone up in the last 20
years. I think that the fact that ITV news is at six o’clock
and before the UK news makes a lot more sense now than it did. I
think it makes a lot more sense to viewers. I’m not saying
that that’s the principal reason why more people are watching
now than might have been 10 years ago, but I think it’s
reflecting the constitutional changes that have happened, the
relevance of Welsh news to people. I think people are recognising
that. But does that then translate into people being willing to pay
for it? That’s the key question. The key question here is: to
what degree will people pay for it, or to what degree is publicly
available funding available to support it? I think what
you’re seeing in the Welsh market is that people aren’t
willing to pay for it, so, if people think it’s valuable
then, I suppose, perhaps the only solution then is to make public
money available to support it. But that’s a matter for policy
makers, not for me.
|
|
[247] Neil
Hamilton: I take your point about the way in which the media
has changed, and when and where are the journalists of the future
going to come from, but at least one good feature of recent changes
is that the cost of technology and the infrastructure of
broadcasting has dramatically reduced. So, that should actually be
an aid to increasing plurality and having a wider news coverage in
Wales than was possible just a short time ago, given that one
person with a camera can now do everything.
|
|
[248] Mr
Henfrey: Yes, and I think that was the sort of theory that sits
behind local television. We now have local television and 10 years
ago we didn’t have local television. I guess your
question—I’m sure that came up in the evidence session
before us—is: to what degree is that filling the gap that has
been left by what was there? And, again, there’s only so much
funding that local television—and so much revenue—can
draw in, and only a certain level of interest by the consumer. It
has a finite level that it can fulfil. In terms of new
technologies, yes, if you embrace them, yes, if you’re a
progressive organisation and you take on board those changes, then,
yes, you can take advantage of those to better serve viewers. I
would argue that that is what we have done. We are making our money
go further, which is enabling us to better serve viewers than
perhaps we might’ve been able to do 10 years ago. But, again,
there’s only so far you can take that, and I would probably
argue that we are incredibly efficient. Is there room for more
efficiencies? Probably not.
|
|
[249] Neil
Hamilton: I think that this leads on to other questions that
other people will answer.
|
|
[250] Bethan
Jenkins: Diolch. Suzy has a supplementary.
|
|
[251] Suzy
Davies: Yes. It’s very much related to this. There is a
lack of plurality in Wales, full stop, but there’s an
assumption that there’s a BBC voice and that there’s an
ITV voice, when, actually, both of those major broadcasters could
have different versions of that voice. On the online platforms,
does ITV go actively seeking new ways to get news out to different
audiences—online, now, not on the main television?
|
|
[252] Mr
Henfrey: I think the important thing to say around digital is
that digital, like all commercial players, has to earn its place.
How do you earn money from digital? Usually you earn money by the
volume of clicks that you get, and that can lead to a certain form
of story coverage. That can lead to a certain form of journalism,
and I think what we have looked to do is to balance that reach that
we can achieve with reputation. So, for example, we know that,
frankly, coverage of this institution is not going to get many
clicks on our website, but I think, when you look at our digital
news service, you’ll see quite detailed coverage of politics.
You’ll see detailed coverage of other things that are,
frankly, probably not that interesting to a digital audience.
|
|
[253] Suzy
Davies: What I actually meant is—because everything is on
your ITV website, I get that, but do you use other forms of social
media, like Facebook and Twitter, to guide individuals into
different directions?
|
|
[254] Mr
Henfrey: I was coming to that. I think the point I’m
trying to make is that what we’re not doing is purely
pursuing an editorial agenda that says, ‘We want to reach as
many people as possible’. What we are saying is that we feel
that this content is important, so we make it available for people
to consume it. We take the same approach with using new platforms,
such as social media. One of the things that we did with creating
the website was—. That’s a platform that we can
control, but I think one of the things that, absolutely,
we’re seeing in the industry is that there are new platforms
emerging all the time, and how do you get your content onto those
platforms?
|
|
[255] So, you will
have seen, during the election, the interview that Robert Peston
did with Theresa May using Facebook Live. Now, that’s a
really interesting way of engaging an audience who want to ask
questions. The theatre of television has a format called ‘Ask
the leaders’, you know: a big studio, you’ve got to
bring in an audience, it’s got to be balanced and so on and
so forth. It’s quite a large, cumbersome thing to do, but
very effective in television terms. But now, on social media,
there’s this new format that exists—Facebook Live. You
can use it in that way that people can ask directly the questions
to their politicians. Personally, I think that’s very
exciting, and we are always constantly looking within what we do to
try and exploit that further. We’re looking currently
internally about how we can rebalance and recalibrate some of our
newsroom resources to put more resources into the digital from what
we’ve got, because that’s clearly something that is
enabling us to reach, potentially, new audiences for our content.
It’s something we’re very alert to.
|
|
[256] The flipside to
all of that, of course, is that if it’s a platform you
don’t control, and you put considerable investment into it,
if somebody decides to change an algorithm or to change their
business strategy, you have no control around that, and then all of
a sudden, potentially, that could be gone, and so what you’re
trying to do is you’re, in effect, trying to ride three
horses: there’s clearly an audience still, and will be for
some time to come, for what we do in terms of television; we want
to maintain a platform that we do control, that remains relevant to
people despite changing audiences; and we want to try and make sure
that our content is reaching people via other platforms. Actually,
for a commercial company, that’s quite a challenge, but I
think we’re doing quite well with that. Again, I put it in
the context of: in the digital space, we were nowhere 10 years ago.
Now, I think we have a very credible offer, both across what we do
in mobile, and in terms of what we’re trying to do in terms
of Facebook and other social media.
|
|
[257]
Suzy Davies: Thank you.
|
|
[258]
Bethan Jenkins:
Zoe, I’m just conscious—do
you have anything to add to that?
|
|
[259]
Ms Thomas: Just, I think, the fact that it’s a case of
knowing the audience, isn’t it? Different social media
attract different audience profiles, effectively, and you try and
tailor the stories that you’re putting out on the different
media, and you try and do them in a different way. Some of them
lend themselves more to video, some of them lend themselves more to
text, and you know what people respond to. I think that’s
something that we try and concentrate on, whilst, at the same time,
also trying to balance that fact with actually maintaining things
within our own website that we can control and that we have
autonomy over, really.
|
|
[260]
Bethan Jenkins:
Lee also has a supplementary.
|
|
[261]
Lee Waters: Can I just follow up your point on platforms? You say
in your written evidence that in order to continue to give ITV a
fair chance of making a reasonable return on its investment, the
policy focus should be on the economic balance between public
service broadcasters and platforms. Could you elaborate on
that?
|
|
[262] Mr Henfrey: Well, I think that Ofcom has got a statistic that is
really quite interesting; I think something close to 50 per cent of
digital consumption is of the PSB’s website, and I think
that’s highly significant. Again, I’d probably come
back to this element of what I regard as trust. There’s lots
of content out there. It’s relatively easy to find it, but to
what degree can you trust it? And we are trusted, as I’ve
said, and I think the principal thing that we are doing at the
moment is putting our brand on these platforms, so that our
content, which we know that people trust and that people should
trust, is starting to emerge in people’s platforms, in their
timelines. But we are constantly having to ride two horses, if that
makes sense. We are obligated to the television—we are. And
there’s a great life within that—there is. But at the
same time, we can see the potential that digital provides us. And I
suppose, probably, what we’re saying in that is that,
potentially, we need to keep recalibrating, as these change, and
just be alert to the fact that we need to continue to look at this
not as a fixed model, but as a dynamic model. Audience consumption
is changing. There is real potential, in the future, for trusted,
impartial news to reach people digitally. Fifty per cent of
that consumption seems to come from the public service
broadcasters. That’s of great value, we would argue, plus the
television. What we’re saying to policy makers is to be alert
to that value and, in your own deliberations, as you consider the
wider market, just bear that in mind in terms of where you might
put support or not.
|
|
11:00
|
|
[263] Lee
Waters: So, what do you think the policy focus should be?
|
|
[264] Mr
Henfrey: It shouldn’t all be on the television, it
shouldn’t all be on the digital. I completely understand why
this is—. To my mind, sometimes, I do question to what degree
people really understand the value of what the television continues
to bring and for how long it will continue to do so. I think,
particularly in a Welsh context, it’s something like 50 per
cent of the population who are over 50. That audience who, again,
we know doesn’t consume digital media as much as the under
35s—you know, they are an important section of the audience,
and they are well served under television, and should continue to
be so for many years to come, I would argue, whilst at the same
time, yes, audience behaviours are changing. There are great
opportunities with digital. And, as public service broadcasters,
we’re alert to that and we’re looking to create ways
for our content to migrate onto digital. In terms of the policy
focus, I suppose my plea would be, ‘Don’t overly
concentrate on the digital; don’t forget the tv, and,
actually look at the way that the tv can translate into the digital
space.’
|
|
[265] Lee
Waters: So, you’re suggesting that there should be a
similar public service broadcasting burden, if you like, on other
platforms, just as there is on the television?
|
|
[266] Mr
Henfrey: No. I’m probably more saying that it’s
enabling the public service broadcasters to continue to
adapt—that the burden may potentially hold them back from
adapting.
|
|
[267] Lee
Waters: Indeed; I understand that. But where then would the
public service broadcasting come from?
|
|
[268] Mr
Henfrey: I’m not saying it’s an either/or. Again,
that’s probably my point: if the whole policy focus is on
about the future and digital, then perhaps the focus is moving away
from the public service broadcasting where, I think, it probably
should stay, because the public service broadcasters are actually
doing good work in the digital space as well.
|
|
[269] Lee
Waters: So, it’s a plea for further deregulation.
|
|
[270] Mr
Henfrey: Not necessarily. I think, again, it’s about not
seeing it as a fixed system; that there is clearly change
happening, and being alert to, being able to recalibrate
that—. What is it that is valued? You know, if we were having
this discussion, say, 15 years ago, and we were talking about, say,
the electronic programme guide—you know, ‘How valuable
is that to sustain public service broadcasting?’—people
might not have thought it very valuable, and I think that
that’s the sort of elements—. You know, there’s
clearly a finite shelf life for how valuable the EPG might be. But,
you know, 50 per cent of consumption of digital news is from public
service broadcasters. Does that have a value to sustain public
service broadcasting?
|
|
[271] Lee
Waters: I understand the changing landscape, and I understand,
you know, your strategic dilemmas. What I’m not clear on is
you saying, ‘A key policy focus should be the balance between
the platforms and the PSBs.’ I’m just not clear what
you think should be done differently to enable public service
broadcasting to flourish in this more fluid environment.
|
|
[272] Mr
Henfrey: I think, probably, all we’re saying there is,
‘Please don’t take your eye off the public service
broadcasting ball while trying to think about the digital
space’.
|
|
[273] Lee
Waters: Okay, thank you.
|
|
[274] Bethan
Jenkins: Hannah.
|
|
[275] Hannah
Blythyn: Thank you, Chair. Turning to support for news
journalism in Wales, I think you said about the decline of
traditional news journalism probably having an impact on ITV Cymru
Wales as well. So, I wonder if you could expand on what action
you’ve been able to take to mitigate that and any support for
news journalism outside ITV Wales Cymru itself. I know it’s
in your evidence—you talk about the placement you offer the
next generation and the work you’re doing with Eastern High
School, about the Business Class initiative.
|
|
[276] Ms
Thomas: Well, we started the Business Class initiative, for
example, in September last year. So, this is the first year of a
three-year relationship with them. Really, that’s about
supporting the teachers and the pupils and their aspirations for
learning and things. For example, the year 7s are coming in over
the next couple of weeks to talk to us about news and how
it’s consumed, and fake news and how it’s put together.
Hopefully, we will learn something from them as well, as very young
consumers, of how they want to see it in the future, which may
enable us to change in that ever-changing landscape that
we’ve been talking about, really. But, with any luck, that
sort of also shows a whole generation of youngsters what is going
on in Wales, that there are journalism and technical roles as well
that they can aspire to, that they can actually physically belong
in their city. I think a lot of people still seem surprised.
They’re actually, ‘Is this going on here in
Wales?’ So, we’ve been doing stuff with them;
we’ve been doing stuff with their GCSE students to help them
with literacy and speech—you know, giving
speeches—ahead of their GCSE exams and everything. So,
hopefully, that’s also giving them some ambitions for the
future in terms of what they might do, and hopefully, in time, as
that relationship develops, we’re hoping to bring more
placements on in that.
|
|
[277] But that’s
just part of what we do. We do the Breaking into News initiative,
where a young aspiring journalist comes to get to work and be
mentored by one of our journalists. They then produce a news
package, which goes out on air, about a subject that they’ve
researched and done. That’s led, in the last couple of years,
to us giving a contract to one of the Breaking Into News
journalists that came to us. So, we try to do a number of things.
We’re trying to do more—you know, going out to visit
schools and to careers fairs—to try and show what we do and
that it’s a viable option, and that there are other ways in,
potentially, than maybe the traditional ones of going to university
and then doing postgraduates, all of which obviously costs a great
deal of money. It isn’t the only way in, but it has been,
traditionally, the preferred route, really.
|
|
[278] Mr
Henfrey: As Zoe says, what we’re trying to do is to
increase the number of pathways into the business. We recently
started, a couple of years ago, some apprenticeships, which worked
very successfully, but they’d been mostly in the technical
area. So, we looked to see if we could do an apprenticeship in
journalism. Now, in England, there is something called the junior
journalist apprenticeship, which, in effect, places people within
newsrooms, and they come out of it with a journalistic
qualification. There’s no such apprenticeship in Wales.
There’s a broader kind of apprenticeship where you choose
modules, but what you don’t come out of that with is a
journalistic qualification. So, we’re going to look to try
and create something ourselves, but that almost feels like a bit of
an unnecessary barrier, in some ways. If Government policy is to go
down the route of more apprenticeships to increase pathways into
industries such as ours, it would be great if there was something
that they’re doing in England that could be replicated in
Wales. It would certainly make my job a little bit easier.
|
|
[279] Bethan
Jenkins: Jeremy.
|
|
[280] Jeremy
Miles: Have you been calling for that kind of framework to be
put in place?
|
|
[281] Mr
Henfrey: I just have.
|
|
[282] Jeremy
Miles: Great.
|
|
[283] Mr
Henfrey: Because it’s literally one of those—.
We’ve only become aware of it in the last couple of months as
colleagues in England have been considering what options are
available to them, and when we’ve been looking at what
options are available to us.
|
|
[284] Lee
Waters: Can I just follow up on that? You said earlier that you
were worried about where the next generation of journalists was
going to come from, and you clearly think there’s a role for
Government in that too, but as you’ve just implied, you think
there’s a role for you as a private company as well to do
your own schemes. So, can you just elaborate on what your thinking
is and what you’re doing to help maintain the skills base of
the industry?
|
|
[285] Mr
Henfrey: I don’t think I can really add more to what Zoe
and I have just said, really. I think, in terms of the initiatives
that we’re taking, we’re trying to look into developing
an apprenticeship, because I think that’s an important route.
We don’t struggle to recruit postgraduates—we
don’t. There’s good availability there. Cardiff School
of Journalism is one of the best in the UK, so that’s a great
source of talent. But in order for our news service to continue to
be relevant, it’s got to be inclusive of all the parts of
Wales and all the communities. So, that’s one of the reasons
why we’re pursuing an apprenticeship. Within that, I’ve
not got any additional funding within my budget for an
apprenticeship budget. It’s about, again, reorganising and
reprioritising within what we do, because we feel that it’s
important. So, I think that’s quite a significant initiative.
And the outreach, too—we have moved to a new base here in
Cardiff Bay, which is possibly one of the most diverse parts of
Wales, and so, as Zoe has said, we’re starting to reach out
to the community now around our building to say, ‘We are
interested in you, and that we are interested in
your’—
|
|
[286] Lee
Waters: Is that primarily about the journalism or are you
investing in other craft training, too?
|
|
[287] Mr
Henfrey: As I say, there are apprenticeships that exist within
the craft. We’ve done that now, this would be the third year
running that we’ve done that. And I’m very pleased to
say as well that, in the main, the apprentices that we’ve
taken on through the apprenticeship have gone on to secure work
with us, which is terrific. Within that, now, I’d like to
expand that into journalism, but we’re finding that a little
bit more problematic, if I can put it that way. But we’ll get
there. What I’m keen to do is to make sure that, however we
do that apprenticeship—and we’ve had really good
support from the providers in Wales to try and find a way around
it—is that they end up with a qualification that’s
recognised in journalism. I think that’s really important,
because I won’t necessarily be able to guarantee that they
have a job, but what I hope to be able to do is to provide them
with the experience and the qualification that they can take into
the wider industry.
|
|
[288] Lee
Waters: Okay, thank you.
|
|
[289] Hannah
Blythyn: Moving to a slightly different topic, Zoe, in an
earlier answer, talked about how, traditionally, you used to get
quite a lot of stories from local newspapers, especially in terms
of covering local democracy in councils, and now, as they’ve
moved and the way we consume news has changed, and you’ve got
the more hyperlocal sites covering that sort of thing, does ITV
Cymru Wales link up or do any work in terms of sharing content with
any hyperlocal news providers?
|
|
[290] Mr
Henfrey: No, we don’t. Equally, in some ways, we never
have. I think the point I was making around that, again, would be,
having come from local newspapers, there is, in a sense, nothing
new to hyperlocal. When I worked in local newspapers, there was
what we would call community correspondents—people who used
to write in about their part of the world—and we used to
publish those within the newspaper and before we published,
we’d always read them just to see, actually, whether there
might be a bigger story. Sometimes, the community correspondent
might find themselves on the front page of the paper. Again, as
those newspapers decline—Wales has always had a really
thriving weekly newspaper market, and that’s clearly changing
at the moment—the question is: where are those community
correspondents and where are their platforms? Now, in some ways,
the platforms still exist. I’m sure that, actually, Facebook
itself has kind of replaced that, but I think what newspapers did
was to bring an audience to that community news, and that, I think,
is the biggest challenge of all. It’s not necessarily whether
the content is there, but whether the audience is there for that
content. That’s a larger question.
|
|
[291] In terms of what
we do, again, could we provide a kind of platform for community
news? Perhaps. We’re constantly looking all the time at our
strategy for digital, and that’s currently going through
review. But at the moment, it’s not something we do.
|
|
[292] Bethan
Jenkins: Okay, moving on, back to Lee Waters.
|
|
[293] Lee
Waters: Yes, it’s just on that point about what role you
have to maintain the broader ecosystem both in skills and in the
local news market. I guess, as a commercial broadcaster,
you’ve traditionally tended to look to what you need to do
and what is in your commercial interests to do, rather than having
any formal obligation to go beyond that. Because, as you’ve
described, the ecosystem you’ve survived in is fragmenting
and falling away. You’ve already touched upon it, because
you’re now thinking about what you need to do to intervene in
that marketplace yourselves, to help yourself in the longer term.
So, just around that hyperlocal system—interesting what you
just said about community news—can you just tell us a little
bit more what you’re thinking around that and what the
options might be?
|
|
11:15
|
|
[294] Mr
Henfrey: I suppose, when I ask myself the question: what is
disappearing? As I say, it’s probably not necessarily the
content. It’s more that kind of leadership that sits around
that content. This is in no way a new kind of concept, but the role
of the journalists themselves—the independent
journalist—as a kind of curator, I think will continue to
increase. I think, increasingly too, because a journalist
themselves is no longer—our journalists are no longer limited
to purely our platform. That’s an interesting development, so
it’s Twitter et cetera. What our journalists can increasingly
become is a guide to—‘Have you seen—? Are you
aware of—?’ and so on and so forth, which is something,
perhaps, 10 or 15 years ago, wasn’t an option.
|
|
[295] I think, within
our context—we’re a national broadcaster, but we have a
footprint right across Wales, and whenever a job comes up in
Cardiff, I’m always asking myself the question, ‘Does
it have to be done in Cardiff?’ Increasingly, the
technological imperatives that sometimes sat behind jobs having to
be the main centre are weakening as technology allows us to do more
things. So, potentially—and this is all
potential—you’ve got two things there where technology
allows you to spread yourself out more across the nation and those
individuals themselves can potentially provide more of a curating
role for their own local hinterland—expertise, trusted et
cetera.
|
|
[296] But beyond that,
we are constrained commercially. We do things, ultimately, because
they meet the terms of our license and we do those because
that’s a commercial contract. We would have to look very
carefully at anything that we decided to do and any effort that we
put into something that, in a sense, either detracts from that core
purpose or, actually, is not going to make a commercial return.
Ultimately, there are many interventions already in the market and
the direction of travel, I suppose, is only going in one direction,
that says if you want to sustain what currently exists, the
question is: to what degree is the public’s appetite there
for public intervention and what ideas do the policy makers have
for what form that public intervention should take?
|
|
[297] Lee
Waters: And what is the role of the private sector in working
alongside that?
|
|
[298] Mr
Henfrey: Yes, but—
|
|
[299] Lee
Waters: It’s not just the responsibility of the state to
do that, is it? If in the longer term you rely for your commercial
business model on that ecosystem to be there, you, as the private
sector, have a role to sustain that too in the longer term, surely,
in your own self-interest.
|
|
[300] Mr
Henfrey: I suppose I’d probably argue: to what degree are
we reliant upon that? It is a benefit to—does it ultimately
prevent us from fulfilling our purposes? No, and we would probably
look to find ways around it. I think if policy makers look
continually to the private sector to fix the problem, the problem
might not get fixed.
|
|
[301] Lee
Waters: Thank you.
|
|
[302] Bethan
Jenkins: Have you got anything else? That’s fine. Okay,
Suzy.
|
|
[303] Suzy
Davies: I’ve just got a question before the other one
that I wanted to ask you. Obviously, you’ve got these two
satellite trucks and you have reporters in key places in
Wales—I’m just looking at your evidence here. News
stories don’t conveniently spread themselves across Wales.
So, those journalists who are in key locations, but actually
aren’t appearing daily, or even weekly, on your news
bulletins, what are they doing? [Laughter.]
|
|
[304] Mr
Henfrey: Good question. What are they doing?
|
|
[305] Suzy
Davies: Perhaps I should ask: what else are they doing?
|
|
[306] Ms
Thomas: I think the reality is that nobody is on every day, but
they are on—
|
|
[307] Suzy
Davies: Exactly. It’s a genuine question.
|
|
[308] Ms
Thomas: —quite regularly, and actually, the whole thing
with technology has enabled that to change in the last five or six
years, really, because then, brutally, we were reliant, quite
often, on a satellite truck getting to them if we wanted to do
something, especially if it happened late in the day. Now,
we’ve got these LiveU packs, which are about this big and fit
on the back of every camera. Every journalist who is based outside
the Cardiff newsroom now has one, which means that, actually, 3G or
4G aside, if they can get those signals, they can send us material
very quickly. So, sometimes, it may be that the Swansea
correspondent isn’t on on a particular day, but he may very
well have provided material for somebody else—a case study
for someone else. He may be providing a live shot for somebody
else, because we have the ability to do that in a way that we
didn’t, even two or three years ago, with only the two
satellite trucks, with the live facility now. There are, I think,
seven LiveUs in our newsroom generally. They’re used by
programmes and news, as well as the two
satellite trucks, so, actually, we
now have the ability to do an awful lot more and get to those
places, and those people have the ability to get on air a lot
quicker, either with themselves in the form of lives or in pictures
or in stories or in clips with people, in a way that we just
didn’t have just a couple of years ago, really.
|
|
[309]
Suzy Davies: Okay. It’s helpful to know that, because
obviously we’ve got situation now where the BBC has
plans to send journalists into various newsrooms in order to help
report on local democracy, which I’d like to think is local
councils, but I’m not sure whether it’s going to
actually look like that in the end. Are you going to be interested?
Or are you even allowed to tap into the product that they may give
us in the end?
|
|
[310] Mr Henfrey: I’d be interested, but
my understanding is that, unlike other ITV licensees, we
wouldn’t be allowed under the rules. I’m no expert on
it, but as far as I understand the rules, ITV Wales shouldn’t
apply to be part of it. I think potentially licence holders in
Scotland could. But I don’t understand the rules and I
didn’t frame them.
|
|
[311]
Suzy Davies: Okay. Well, that might be worth doing a little bit of
work on, actually.
|
|
[312]
Bethan Jenkins:
We’ll have a look into that,
then.
|
|
[313]
Suzy Davies: And how do you feel about the Leighton Andrews
report, which came out yesterday, saying that actually we should be
doing it for ourselves here in this building? So, you’ve got
the BBC coming into newsrooms, you’ve got us lot doing it
ourselves. What are the implications for you on that? Is this good
news? Does it lift the load, or is it actually something that is
holding a mirror up to you, perhaps, on what you might be able to
do?
|
|
[314]
Mr Henfrey: Gosh, what to say? I think, in all seriousness with
the BBC point, if we could access that content from BBC journalists
then what you absolutely could do is say that that is independently
produced, that is impartial, and that meets the tests that I might
want to have to put that on my news service. I think if what the
Assembly is proposing could meet that test for
impartiality—
|
|
[315]
Suzy Davies: Oh, we’d want it to meet that test, don’t
worry.
|
|
[316] Mr Henfrey: But assess how it meets that
test—it’s a question of editorial control, and at the
end of the day, how do you define propaganda? It’s primarily
a message that’s intended to serve the interests of the
messenger.
|
|
[317]
Suzy Davies: I suppose what I’m really asking you is:
because there is now new activity in Wales-wide news production, if
you can put it that way, do you feel that you can take your foot
off the pedal as an institution yourselves in sourcing stories?
Maybe that’s more for Zoe, actually.
|
|
[318] Mr Henfrey: With respect, I think
it’s probably a broader point. Ultimately, we’re
sitting here because, quite rightly and understandably,
committee’s concerned about the decline in news provision in
Wales in general, and we’re talking ultimately about a
reduction of investment in that journalism, and at the moment there
are a number of people paid for by the public who are paid to get
the message out for this institution. Now, you could argue whether
that money’s being well spent already, and what’s on
the table is an opportunity to spend even more money to achieve the
same end. What’s not being proposed, I suppose, is somebody
saying, ‘Here’s a contestable fund that would be
completely arm’s length, and we would have absolutely no say
over what it was used for in that sort of wider sense, but we think
it would contribute to the public good if, say, it looked to
support investigations into things that are going wrong in Wales,
or would look to—’ and so on and so forth. Now, if
you’d asked me a question about that, I’d be saying,
‘I think that’s a fantastic initiative that could
really give a real boost to the sector in Wales. I think it would
be welcomed by journalists and broadcasters and newspapers
alike.’ But we’re not sitting here talking about that.
We’re not sitting here talking about spending public money on
that. We’re talking about spending public money on something
that is primarily intended to serve the interests of the messenger,
which is absolutely nothing short of propaganda.
|
|
[319]
Suzy Davies: But hang on, this Assembly represents the people of
Wales, doesn’t it?
|
|
[320]
Mr Henfrey: Yes, it does. Absolutely.
|
|
[321] Suzy Davies: And they want to know
what’s going on here, and nobody is giving that, perhaps, the
attention it deserves. That would be my view on it.
|
|
[322] Mr Henfrey: But there’s an issue of
trust. When a press officer puts out a press release, if I as a
news organisation simply printed that press release—headline,
body of text et cetera, et cetera—you would quite rightly say
to me, ‘Hold on a second, where’s your editorial
scrutiny of that? Where’s the question that you asked there?
Surely, the story is not the £10 million being spent there,
but in the last paragraph the 650 jobs that are being lost to pay
for it.’
|
|
[323]
Suzy Davies: In fact, then, this is an opportunity for other
broadcasters to pick up on information that could be coming out of
here, and scrutinising it more closely.
|
|
[324]
Mr Henfrey: Indeed, and that information is already available.
This proceeding is televised, there is a public gallery—the
material is already there and it is being provided that scrutiny,
so why spend any more money on it?
|
|
[325]
Suzy Davies: Well, perhaps we might argue that it’s not
getting enough scrutiny, so we’re kind of doing it ourselves.
Anyway, thank you, that’s great. Thank you.
|
|
[326]
Bethan Jenkins:
Okay, thanks. I’m just going to
try, if Members don’t mind, to take one question on Welsh
language news provision and then call it a day, because we are
running substantially over. So, Dawn Bowden.
|
|
[327]
Dawn Bowden: I’ll keep mine very brief, Chair. I’m
just picking up on your evidence about the programmes for S4C, but
I wonder whether you find any particular challenges in your Welsh
language programming.
|
|
[328]
Mr Henfrey: Within the context of journalism, we continue to, I
would argue, make a substantial contribution to Welsh language
journalism through our current affairs programme—
|
|
[329]
Dawn Bowden: The news content I’m particularly talking about
here—
|
|
[330]
Mr Henfrey: —Y Byd ar Bedwar and so on. Ultimately,
pretty much all of Welsh language news content is publicly funded.
We don’t have any, in a sense, opportunities within that
market. If you were to ask me, if S4C were to put out its news
service to tender, would ITV Wales be interested in putting itself
forward, then I think the answer would be ‘yes’. If
you’re asking me if the contract for digital news
that’s currently provided by Golwg360 were to go out to
tender, would ITV Wales be interested in putting itself forward? I
think the answer would be ‘yes’. I think we could bring
a lot to it. But neither of those two things, which are the primary
sources of publicly funded Welsh language
journalism—
|
|
[331]
Dawn Bowden: So, the challenge is the limitations of access
to—
|
|
[332]
Mr Henfrey: The challenge is that there’s no competition
for those services, so as a commercial supplier, if you can’t
compete for it, there’s no opportunity. The economics of
Welsh language news journalism are a lot more challenging than
English language. It requires public funding; it’s not
something that we can do commercially, and the publicly funded
opportunities to do so are not available to other
suppliers.
|
|
[333]
Dawn Bowden: So, it’s opportunity and finance.
|
|
[334]
Mr Henfrey: Yes.
|
|
[335]
Bethan Jenkins:
Thank you for your evidence. If there is
anything else on Welsh language journalism you feel that would be
necessary for us to consider, please do send that in because we
haven’t had the chance to scrutinise it in absolute detail.
Thank you very much for coming in today, and we’ll make sure
we keep you abreast of what we’re doing in relation to this
particular investigation. Thanks once again. Diolch yn fawr
iawn.
|
|
[336]
Mr Henfrey: Thank you.
|
|
11:28
|
|
|
Papur i’w Nodi
Paper to Note
|
|
[337]
Bethan Jenkins:
Rydym yn symud ymlaen at eitem 4:
papur i’w nodi. Mae gen i bapur 4.1, llythyr gan Gadeirydd y
Pwyllgor Cyllid at y Cadeirydd: craffu ar y gyllideb ddrafft. Mae
Cadeirydd y Pwyllgor Cyllid wedi gofyn am drafodaeth ynghylch y
newidiadau a nodir yn y llythyr yn fforwm nesaf y Cadeiryddion. Yn
benodol, mae e am drafod sut y bydd gwaith craffu’r pwyllgor
yn gweithio’n ymarferol, sut y gall y Pwyllgor Cyllid gadw
rôl oruchwylio, sut y gallwn ni weithio gyda’n gilydd i
ymgysylltu cymaint â phosibl â’r cyhoedd, a
diwallu unrhyw anghenion hyfforddi a datblygu ar gyfer pwyllgorau.
A oes unrhyw farn benodol gyda chi ar gyfer ymateb i’r
llythyr hwnnw gan y Cadeirydd? Roeddwn eisiau ei roi ar yr agenda
rhag ofn bod yna sylwadau gyda chi. Na. Ocê, iawn.
|
Bethan
Jenkins: We now move on to item 4: paper to note. I have a
letter, 4.1, from the Chair of the Finance Committee to the Chair:
scrutiny of the draft budget. The Chair of the Finance Committee
has asked for a discussion on the changes noted in the letter in
the Chairs’ forum. He specifically wants to look at how the
committee’s scrutiny work works practically, how the Finance
Committee can keep an supervisory role, how we can collaborate to
engage as much as possible with the public, and meet any training
and development needs for committees. Do you have any specific
views on responding to that letter from the Chair? I wanted to put
it on the agenda in case you had comments. No. Okay, fine.
|
|
11:29
|
|
Cynnig o dan
Reol Sefydlog 17.42 i Benderfynu Gwahardd y Cyhoedd o’r
Cyfarfod
Motion under Standing Order 17.42 to Resolve to Exclude the Public
from the Meeting
|
|
Cynnig:
|
Motion:
|
|
bod y pwyllgor yn penderfynu gwahardd y cyhoedd o weddill y
cyfarfod yn unol â Rheol Sefydlog 17.42(vi).
|
that the committee resolves
to exclude the public from the remainder of the meeting in
accordance with Standing Order 17.42(vi).
|
|
Cynigiwyd y cynnig.
Motion moved.
|
|
[338]
Bethan Jenkins:
Fe wnawn ni symud ymlaen, felly, at
eitem 5: cynnig o dan Reol Sefydlog 17.42 i benderfynu gwahardd y
cyhoedd o’r sesiwn. A ydy pawb yn hapus gyda hynny?
Grêt.
|
Bethan Jenkins: We’ll
move on, therefore, to item 5: a motion under Standing Order 17.42
to exclude the public from the rest of the session. All content?
Great.
|
|
Daeth rhan gyhoeddus y cyfarfod i ben am
11:29.
The public part of the meeting ended at
11:29.
|
