ITV won't rethink sign-language policy

ITV Wales has rejected calls to keep signed headlines for deaf people on its flagship news programme.

This evening will be the last time that headlines on Wales Tonight are accompanied by an in-vision signer, after ITV announced that they would be dropping the service from their regional news programme in Wales.

The decision has angered organisations representing deaf people, prompting four leading groups to write to Elis Owen, the national director of ITV Wales, calling for a change of heart.

RNID Cymru, the Wales Council for Deaf People, the British Deaf Association Wales and the National Deaf Children's Society have told Mr Owen that 'replacing signed headlines with sub-titles is not adequate'.

They added that they believe ITV's actions 'reflect a poor customer service to viewers and an unacceptable lack of understanding of the different communication methods used by deaf and hard of hearing people in Wales'.

Click Play to hear Elinor Smith from the RNID Cymru:



Groundbreaking Service

ITV began broadcasting signed headlines in 1986 when HTV Wales initiated the groundbreaking service for deaf viewers.

An ITV spokesman said: 'ITV Wales will maintain the flagship news programmes Wales Tonight and bulletins during the week and at weekends, but in line with all other ITV regions, we are discontinuing the signed 20 seconds headlines every weekday.'

The issue was raised at the National Assembly on Tuesday, where First Minister Rhori Morgan said ITV was showing 'a consistent pattern whereby it is trying to wriggle out of its public service broadcasting obligations'.

Mr Morgan added: 'There is no possible justification for dropping the signed news service just beacuse it may not be available in all of the English regions or in Scotland or Northern Ireland'.

Click Play to hear the First Minister respond to Lorraine Barrett AM in the Senedd:



'Limited Powers'

The broadcasting regulator Ofcom says it was not consulted by ITV before the decision to drop signed headlines was taken, and that the broadcaster was not required to do so.

Rhodri Williams, director of Ofcom in Wales, said: 'Ofcom appreciates that sign language users in Wales will regret ITV Wales' decision to end sign presented news headlines on Wales Tonight. However, Ofcom's powers in this area are limited.'

Mr Williams also denies that there is any connection between the regulator's approval of ITV's reduction in regional news output and the removal of signed headlines from its regional news programmes.

'While Ofcom has agreed a reduction to the minimum required amount of news on ITV Wales, this affects only some daytime bulletins, rather than the 6pm programme. It is entirely unrelated to the issue of signing,' he said.

Signing will be phased out of ITV's other regional news programmes over the next week. There are currently signed headlines or summaries on the ITV regions in: Wales, Border, Meridian and Thames Valley, West, and West Country.

Xpress on 87.7FM

A student radio station is about to open its programming to thousands of new listeners.

Xpress, which is run by students at Cardiff University students' union, broadcasts music and chat for 17 hours a day on the internet, and in the students' union building on Park Place.

The team running the station have successfully applied for a restricted service license (RSL) from the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, which allows them to transmit their programmes on the 87.7FM frequency across Cardiff and the surrounding area for the next four weeks.

According to the radio station's manager, Gareth Rees, the RSL will give them a much bigger audience than they usually get online because commuters in their cars and radio listeners scanning for new channels could start tuning-in to Xpress.

Click Play to hear an interview I did with Gareth earlier today.



Xpress is on air on 87.7FM across Cardiff from Monday, February 9 for four weeks.

You can listen online by clicking here.

Capturing Cardiff: Cathays Cemetery Chapels Renovation

Cathays Cemetery Chapels Renovation

Cathays cemetery covers 110 acres and sits a few miles north of Cardiff city centre. Its gates opened in 1859, and the cemetery quickly filled with the graves of civic leaders, influential Welsh families and the humble faithful who took pride in tending the burial plots of their beloved dead.

Palm Sunday drew thousands of people clutching flowers to the cemetery, some of whom are pictured in this archive photo (right). Click here to read an account of Palm Sunday in the Western Mail from 1859, where the paper refers to the site as the New Cemetery and describes how between 15,000 and 20,000 people went there that day.

At the main entrance to the cemetery on Fairoak Road, horse-drawn funeral carriages would arrive and shelter from the Welsh rain under the gothic archways that linked the Anglican and non-conformist chapels, while mourners filed indoors to bless their lost relatives and friends depending on the dead's denomination.

These two chapels were built by RG Thomas of Newport and Thomas Waring of Cardiff in the year the cemetery opened, and cost £5,200. A bell tower stands between them, and each has its own portico to house a horse and hearse during the funeral services. A third chapel, for Catholic services, was built some time later and stood within the grounds of the cemetery until its structure became so dangerous that it had to be demolished in the 1990s.

Now, in 2009, work has begun to restore these remaining two chapels into buildings that can be used as religious sites and to display the history of Cathays cemetery.

The roofs of both buildings are in desperate need of repair - there hasn't been a service held inside the two chapels since the late 1980s, and since then they have become derelict and dangerous.

Cardiff Council has secured £200,000 to start renovating the grade-II listed buildings, although it could cost up to a million pounds to bring either building back into full working order. To mark the 150th anniversary of the chapels' opening, the Lord Mayor of Cardiff Councillor Kate Lloyd removed the first tile which signalled the beginning of the huge renovation project.

Campaigners who have been lobbying and fundraising to help get the project started gathered in icy temperatures last week to watch the work get under way. Councillors, construction workers and the press were there too, in what was the largest congregation to arrive at the two chapels in twenty years.

Watch the video below of Councillor Lloyd going up to one of the chapel roofs to remove a tile:



You can go and watch another video of Councillor Lloyd surveying the chapels from above by clicking here.

Already, the Friends of Cathays Cemetery are compiling a comprehensive record of the noble and the noteworthy who reside behind the black iron railings, and they hope one of the renovated chapels can house an exhibition recounting the cemetery's history. Famous residents include "Peerless" Jim Driscoll, the Cardiff boxer whose funeral drew 100,000 people onto the streets of Heath and Cathays; airship pioneer Ernest Willows; and William Llewellyn Rhys, reportedly one of the few survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade whose tomb stone quotes Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Click the Play icon below to hear from John Farnhill (pictured left) from the Friends of Cathays Cemetery.




Cardiff council has a dedicated team who look after all of its cemeteries and the other business associated with them. Martin Birch (right) manages the authority's bereavement services. Click the Play icon to hear him discuss the historic chapels:




Below is a satellite map detailing the boundaries of Cathays cemetery south of the A48 (Eastern Avenue), and the location of the two chapels at the Fairoak Road entrance. Double-click on the map to zoom in, and click the tags for more ground-level images and information.


Click here to view a larger version of this map

From 1859 to 2009 Cardiff has changed immeasurably. Stepping inside the heavy gates of Cathays Cemetery transports you back to a forgotten era of flambuoyant adoration of the dead, of eerie gothic architecture, and of a country steeped in religious rites.

You cannot fail to be overwhelmed by the chapels' imposing presence on the edge of this giant space, despite their aging and scarred appearance. Now with new life and modern means they can be restored to gothic glory and ensure one of Britain's largest and most historic cemeteries can survive for generations as testament to the Victorian's extravagant respect for their dead.

Click through the photographs below to move from 1859 to the modern restoration project:


Media Wales and Media Convergence

The start of the new year always brings some recurring questions to a Welshman working in the media.


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

Why BBC Local decision is bad news for Wales

There is an argument occasionally proffered by historians, journalists and statesmen that Wales only became a nation when the BBC decided to call it one.

When transmitters were erected across Britain at the dawn of the TV revolution, the island was divided into English regions and Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish nations. The move, it's argued, promoted patriotism within these culturally distinctive nations and paved the way for the devolved governments which now operate within their capitals.

But while the Celts revelled in achieving a recognised identity, England's regions enjoyed a more localised service which directly reflected its smaller audience's tastes and interests. In Wales though, only the national picture prevailed. This meant that whether one watched BBC or the brand-new ITV, the offering was consistently diverse enough to be relevant to everyone and no-one.

To this day, the distinctly different demands of Welsh communities are not consistently addressed by any of our national broadcasters. BBC Wales does its best - occasional west Wales opt-outs on BBC Radio Cymru, and live match commentary for either Cardiff City, Swansea City or Wrexham depending on your locality. But if audiences want community news they must opt for an unreliable local radio bulletin or the decidedly shaky online offerings of their local papers.

This is why the BBC Trust's decision to call a halt to the corporation's ambitious local websites plan is such a blow for Wales. The sites would have given a reliable, trustworthy source of local news and information that is currently unavailable. They would also offer a portal for people to access services within their area that would otherwise have gone undiscovered, and encouraged people to engage with their community via the BBC's reputation for honesty and good journalism.

Crucially, the sites would have been available in Welsh as well as English. This vital element would have given life into the communities that are struggling to keep their native Welsh speakers from leaving for bigger towns or English cities. Community news in Welsh has traditionally fallen on the now ailing network of Welsh language community newspapers like Y Dinesydd in Cardiff, and Yr Hogwr in Bridgend. They are staffed by an aging group of dedicated volunteers, but the readership among younger generations is almost negligible.

These community papers would benefit from taking the BBC's axed plans on board and developing their own websites, and hopefully the cash won by Golwg (the Welsh language weekly magazine) to launch an online Welsh news service will be enough to nourish local Welsh language news rather than another version of BBC Newyddion Ar-Lein.

Wales's communities would have benefited immeasurably from the BBC's local video websites. Hopefully the commercial sector will now react and produce more reliable, interesting local content without the threat of bigger and better offerings from the Beeb.

How to get high on Google

Over at my arts blog, search engine optimisation unexpectedly made an appearance this week.

I had written a piece about the palaver surrounding Patrick Jones' poetry reading, but its headline seemingly lent itself to Google's search machine priorities and within hours it was amongst the top five results for people searching combinations of "Welsh", "poet" and "Christian Voice".

Of course, there's far more to achieving a first-page result on Google than the make-up of your headline. Ensuring your journalism is part of a network means people will read you, link to you, and come back to you. Only by interacting with other journalists in your network can you achieve consistently high Google rankings, and generate a steady stream of traffic.

But why should readers come back at all? Far from saturating your blog with keywords and spamming the comment threads of others by depositing a link along with a banal sentence, networked journalism requires you to earn your readers' respect.

The best bloggers provide regular, articulate comment that encourages a loyal readership regardless of whether everything they say is necessarily accurate or informative. In politics, Iain Dale states he's had over half a million unique visitors to his blog in the last year, and lists the top sites which generate the most traffic. He is easily trumping half the magazines on the news-stand with results like that.

And readership numbers on the internet are far easier to calculate than in the conventional press. The ABCs don't take into account the fact that a reader doesn't consume every article on every page. But a service like Google Analytics gives an absolute breakdown, so a blog-owner can immediately assess which articles work and which ones don't.

This is great for small-scale bloggers, but priceless information for corporations tip-toeing carefully into the blogosphere. When cash is your main motivation, getting accurate data about who is consuming your product means you can deliver what they want and keep them coming back for more. This is particularly relevant in niche markets, and allows blogs to develop quickly into reliable sources of informed comment on a particular subject.

The sad truth is that without a wider network, a few choice keywords in your headline don't do enough to draw in new readers or keep old ones coming back. The proof? My post on the Welsh poet has now vanished into the Google ether, without a network to support its veracity or reliability.

This post is a response to the Online & Mobile Media lecture on Wednesday, November 12, 2008.

Social Media

As the traditional models of journalism fall apart, a new era of social media is seeing a surge in the number of tools available to publish and broadcast one's own news and views.

But just how reliable are the tools, and do they really allow a story or an opinion to be aired to an acceptable standard?

Following my introduction to Qik during the lecture on social media, I began experimenting straight away. The service gripped me immediately, but I was also quick to notice how the technology is definitely at the early stages of its life.

I decided to put the service to a test, and planned to stream Kate Adie as she arrived to discuss her new book this evening.

Here's the result:



It's certainly brief. In fact, I'm not sure Kate Adie even makes it into the shot.

The problem with Qik is that it's a creature ahead of its time. Unless you are in a stable mobile data environment (and when were you last in one of those?) or you're connected via WiFi, you're never going to be able to successfully stream from your mobile device to Qik.

It is inevitable that all areas of technology will not progress at the same rate, but Qik demands so much from a mobile phone that, in the end, the phone just can't cope and the streaming cuts out.

Let's put it in context: Qik is a genuinely useful and liberating service. But it's not something every mobile phone user can get on with easily (or even a few mobile phone users, for that matter). However, the major TV networks are already broadcasting via broadband, and using internet connections to link correspondents with presenters when a satellite truck is unavailable or impractical.

The power of broadcasting online is now available to everyone with the right hardware and mobile phone tariff, but meeting the demands that the technology places on one's personal resources means their true usefulness cannot yet be exploited by everyone who wants their own live stream.

Just incase I'm getting a reputation as a Doubting Thomas, here's a Qik stream from the pub that worked from start to finish. Why is it always the test that works, and never the big story?!

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