Thomas Tales

Will I go to any parties that don't feature Amanda Protheroe-Thomas in 2009?

Will the press officer notice I'm enjoying the freebies but not plugging their stuff this year?

Can the Western Mail survive another twelve months?

The first two I'll leave until another time (shame!), but the Western Mail's allegedly impending doom has a certain Groundhog Day quality about it. You can chat all day about the paper's falling readership, its wobbly online videos and sometimes bizarre editorial decisions - these aren't symptoms unique to the Western Mail.

Media organisations are converging all over the place, every newspaper is losing readers and rushing into online multimedia endeavours to try and stem the endless dripping away of their incomes. But has Media Wales (the WM's parent company) invested enough in its future beyond a converged newsroom in a snazzy new building?

It'll take more than big ideas to get the staff on board - old hacks don't take kindly to new tricks. Give a grumpy journo a camcorder and ask him to film the interview he'd otherwise have just scribbled down in short-hand and you can already hear the distant hum of NUJ photo-copiers beginning to churn out strike ballots. In fact, the NUJ has been at the forefront of negotiating better deals for those journalists suddenly asked to increase their workload and technological expertise while their colleagues are made redundant. But the scale of the culture shift in newspapers in the last few years is phenomenal, and there's little wonder that some experienced hands at Media Wales are less than impressed with how quickly things are changing.

Crucially, the group's online presence should to lead the way. But it's taking some time for WalesOnline to become anything but a copy-and-paste version of Media Wales's newspapers. Its multimedia content is of variable quality, to say the least; where it excels in producing podcasts and streaming rugby press conferences live, it falters in its attempts to provide TV news bulletins and interviews which are available in better (and more consistent) quality at BBC Wales and ITV Local.

When WalesOnline replaced the dated icWales website, it should have been the birth of an all-singing, all-dancing multi-media upgrade. Instead it presented itself as a rush job, not the foundation for converged technological and journalistic excellence it needed to be in order to establish its birthplace in the digital age.

Media Wales deserves credit for its convergence efforts, for its determination to produce multimedia content, and for providing its staff with equipment and facilities that ensure they have the tools to meet the digital demands.

But all this could be in vein - after all, are enough people interested in multimedia Welsh news to ensure WalesOnline doesn't die?

Image: sskennel/Creative Commons