Case study: the Western Mail

The story of one particular newspaper, the Western Mail, is typical of the experiences of many others and it has been the subject of a handful of academic studies and commentaries (Shipton, 2014; A. Williams & Franklin, 2007; K. Williams, 2003). Devolution was expected to herald a new era of “major political development for the UK[…] that would thrust new roles and

responsibilities” onto regional and local media (McNair, 2009b, p. 164) and that the “distinctive public spheres” of the devolved nations would gain “greater definition and political relevance”

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(ibid p. 178). While Scotland has a relatively strong national press, as I said above, the Welsh media are not in the same position (J. Thomas, 2006a). However, the Western Mail has called itself “the national newspaper of Wales” (Aldridge, 2007, p. 27), and it is for this reason I devote this section to a discussion of the newspaper’s ability to carry out its fourth estate obligations.

First, let us examine cutbacks at the title. An in-depth report of Trinity Mirror’s holdings in Wales found: a 31 per cent drop in staff numbers at the Western Mail and its sister title the South Wales Echo between 1999 and 2005; an increasing workload reported by staff; a rising reliance on PR sources and wire copy; and a corporate enthusiasm for embracing online publishing technologies without a coherent strategy for replacing revenues brought in by print products (A. Williams & Franklin, 2007), concluding that newspapers face a “stark choice”: to

“continue to make cuts with an eye on maintaining short-term profit margins and watch the quality of their news decline over time, or they can invest in their businesses with the aim of producing quality print and digital news products with a view to creating sustainable long-term profits” (ibid p. 104). Trinity Mirror’s multimedia strategy has come alongside a steep

downward trend in the circulation figures of the Western Mail and their other daily newspapers, and coupled with a continuing lack of investment in editorial facilities and cuts to the number of journalism jobs has compromised the newsroom’s ability to produce original, high-quality journalism (J. Thomas & Williams, 2008, pp. 17-18). Meanwhile, profits have remained high, an anomaly the NUJ’s Father of Chapel at Media Wales attributes to “a firm belief that the way to increase profits was not by increasing turnover, but by downsizing the workforce” (Shipton, 2014, p. 73). From 1999 to 2008, Media Wales posted annual profits of between 13 and 38 per cent, while circulation fell by about 40 per cent and editorial and production staff numbers went down by 41 per cent (A. Williams, 2010).

Trinity Mirror acknowledges the decline in print circulations but points to its success in gaining readers online – 1,354,964 monthly unique visitors in 2014 (Media Wales, 2014), a 153 per cent rise on the previous year’s figures (Linford, 2014b). The company has also disputed

39 many of the criticisms put forward in the literature. Media Wales’s editor-in-chief, Alan

Edmunds, rebutted the findings of the 2010 Williams study, and said Media Wales was carrying out “major innovation in tough economic times” (Greenslade, 2010).

This “rapid pace” of online growth has prompted the company to launch Newsroom 3.0, a new system for posting all its news and content on its WalesOnline website before the articles are distributed in its printed newspapers (Turvill, 2014). According to managers at the Wales division of Trinity Mirror, Media Wales Ltd, the new system is intended to grow their online audience: "The model sets us up brilliantly to deliver outstanding and engaging content for our readers and advertisers across all digital and print platforms" (ibid). Another manifestation of the effort to engage online readers is shareable content, often in the form of an article formatted into a list, sometimes called a listicle. Paul Rowland, head of web at Media Wales, presented his experience of creating shareable content at a journalism conference, saying: “Some people would say it’s not journalism but who says we have to do journalism all the time anyway? What we have to do is fit what our audience wants” (McNally, 2014). This approach has caused concern among other journalists working at the Western Mail, who doubt the sustainability of the online model, and the perceived fall in editorial quality that accompanies it. Again, the Western Mail’s Martin Shipton has been particularly critical of the online and convergence strategy:

Companies saw the Internet as a means to make advertising revenue without the expense of producing and distributing newspapers. When the revenues failed to materialise at anywhere near the hoped-for rate, they resorted to the only tactic they could think of: slashing labour costs and harming their papers in the process. Thus will the downward spiral continue until there is nothing left to cut. (Shipton, 2011)

He has likened the resulting working conditions to “the workhouse” (2014, p. 80). Shipton has also criticised Trinity Mirror’s strategy of posting stories online before they appear in the newspaper, concluding that this has had a detrimental effect on newspaper readership, and also

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accused the converged newsroom of destroying “the natural sense of loyalty a journalist feels towards a distinct title with its own style and character. Without a dedicated team working for it, a paper can easily become more bland” (ibid p. 76).

The disparity between the prominence given to the online news model in Trinity’s Mirror’s business strategy and the revenues that are being gathered from them in reality have prompted the NUJ in Wales to join the debate. They gave evidence to the Broadcasting Sub-Committee on the future of the media in Wales in 2011, in which they expressed these worries:

At a time when high levels of profit were being made, investments should have been made in journalism and jobs. Instead, damaging cuts were made so profits would rise even higher. Convergence has only worsened the situation as journalists attempt to produce material for more outlets and platforms with less and less resources. New media provision – digital and online – is too often being produced on a shoestring, and is in reality dependant on the core radio/television/print services consistently under attack. (National Assembly for Wales, 2011)

Studies of Trinity Mirror’s strategy in Wales have made unequivocal recommendations that the group should invest in journalism and newspapers in order to satisfy the basic demands of a healthy democracy. For example, Thomas’s study concluded: “Short-term profit maximisation at the expense of investment in journalism will only weaken the long-term future health of the Welsh press… The evidence clearly suggests that democracy in Wales will inevitably suffer with further cuts to the regional and local press” (J. Thomas, 2006a).

Ten years later, Thomas’s fears are closer to being realised. A recent memo sent by Trinity Mirror in relation to its titles in Birmingham and Coventry acknowledges the view that has been put forward by commentators for more than a decade. Managers responded to a question from staff about how they would manage to give adequate coverage to their patches in view of a recent announcement of 25 redundancies, saying: “The days are long gone when we

41 could afford to be a paper of record and dutifully report everything that happened on our patch”

(Greenslade, 2015). Greenslade called this “one Trinity Mirror sentence that spells the death knell of journalism” (ibid.), concluding that the introduction of targets at the same newspapers is equivalent to a “time-and-motion-study approach” to journalism which encourages “safety-first story-getting, meaning PR pap”, and this undermines the “public benefit” provided by newspapers (ibid.).

As the case of this newspaper reveals, cutbacks have impaired the ability of many newsrooms to carry out good public service journalism. However, in some places the profits-first approach I have detailed so far has also had another side effect: the closure of unprofitable, or less profitable, titles.