A leading Welsh nationalist has called for the principality’s national daily newspaper to be taken into public ownership.
Bethan Jenkins, who sits for Plaid Cymru in the Welsh Assembly, said radical measures were needed to save The Western Mail from decline.
Writing on an independent Welsh news website, she said the Assembly government should nationalise the paper before handing it over to a not-for-profit company run by journalists.
Its current owners, Trinity Mirror, told the BBC they were “not going to dignify this with a comment.”
The call follows the announcement this week of a further 14 job losses at TM’s Cardiff-based Media Wales operation which includes the Western Mail.
Ms Jenkins, who is Plaid Cymru AM for South Wales West, wrote: “The time has come where we need to start thinking radical – really radical.
“So let’s start with a suggestion – take the Western Mail into public ownership, reduce its cover price to little or nothing, and rebuild its circulation in
Wales ready to hand back to a not-for-profit, journalist-run co-operative when it is fit and able to take over the reins.
Ms Jenkins said the Welsh government could spend £10m a year on the takeover, protecting 200 jobs at a cost of £50,000 each.
Trinity Mirror has previously denied claims made by the National Union of Journalists that it plans to turn The Western Mail into a weekly.
Ms Jenkins article on the WalesHome website can be read in full here.
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Don’t be ridiculous, Plaid Cymru. You’ll be telling us you want full independence next, with your own navy…
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…..and own currency.
Still, they can keep the language.
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The Welsh are just ridiculous
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What’s Welsh for Pravda?
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Y Pravda boyo !!
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Lets get this into perspective – Bethan Jenkins has her views but they are the views of a very very small number of people in Wales. Not many people in Wales take her or the Assembly very seriously. Her idea of nationalising the Western Mail is pathetic. This is a publication that competes with the rest of the media in Wales and over the last deacde or so has been in rapid decline.
If people do not want to buy the product either improve it so they do or let it die. Why politicions in Wales procrastonate over this paper is beyond me. It styles itself as the national newspaper of Wales however sells less than 25,000 copies. It’s not even the largest newpaper in Wales – the South Wales Evening Post in Swansea sells nearly double the number of copies and the Daily Post in North Wales has a superior circulation and does not even sell in South Wales.
Anti welsh comments are regrettably what I would expect to get with a story like this and people of the calibre of Bethan Jenkins do not help. However the newspaper industry in Wales does not start and end with the WM.
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Having lived there for a while I think there are essentially two reasons why Welsh politicians have a tendency to overestimate the Western Mail’s importance somewhat:
1. It is the only print title which takes all their endless debates about nationhood, identity and devolution at all seriously, and
2. It is the favoured recruiting ground for BBC Wales – the true voice of the Welsh political and media estabilshment.
I don’t actually think all this attention helps the Western Mail very much at the end of the day. If you strip away all the preconceptions about it as a ‘serious, heavyweight’ title, it’s actually quite a good newspaper.
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