Wales24

Llanelli indie TV producer Tinopolis is going it alone for its bid, which trades on offering output that’s not Cardiff-centric, but has previously said it wants to obtain raw news footage from BBC News. Executive director Angharad Mair: “(The website) will be the core from which everything will flow ... your stories and comments will come straight to us and we’ll use them across our services.

“We will encourage and enable a new generation of citizen journalists with online tutorials, toolkits and templates, because we think the news is for everybody. If the website is our hub, the Wales Tonight programme will be our showcase.”

Taliesin

Named after a sixth-century poet, the JV is so grand an alliance that leader Clive Jones could barely fit all its consistuents’ logos on his PowerPoint slide (ITV Wales’ existing staff, ITN, Northcliffe, Newsquest, Tindle Newspapers, indie TV producer Boomerang, web developer Cube and Cardiff University’s journalism school).

“We will encourage citizen journalists to tell their own stories and make their own content,” Jones said. “We’ll make our own content available to bloggers, community groups and anyone who wants to tell their own stories in their town or village ... we’ll have the ability to have 1,000 voices telling the stories.”

Taliesin’s website “will be a destination point in its own right - but will facilitate content across hundreds of different websites, Jones said, pledging to “fund citizen journalists to help citizens get their stories on the screen”.

“We are in a converging world. The choice is whether you continue having the model of 10, 20, 30 reporters in a newsroom or you gather 100 reporters and tell the story in lots of different ways.”

WalesLive

Already tweeting, publishing its own website and locating a van with a video screen in Cardiff on Wednesday, the JV from UTV and North Wales Newspapers promises to “ensure that north Wales (Ed: often felt neglected by the metropolitan south) finally gets the breadth and depth of coverage that it deserves”, leveraging its experience producing Northern Ireland’s evening TV bulletin and operating several radio stations in south Wales.

And there were more trendy online commitments from UTV MD Michael Wilson: “Citizen journalism will allow content creators to submit their stories directly for publication on our WalesLive.tv site.” Not only that but Wilson also talked about his audience powering a Twitter news stream. Just fancy talk? Maybe not: “We want to empower our viewers across Wales ... we wil develop cross-platform content in new and innovative ways.”

But does any of this amount to anything more than zeitgeisty words? Ofcom partner Stewart Purvis first mooted the public content giveaway in December, so the bidders are ticking this box. But Wilson told me going from DCMS approval to establishing an IFNC before possible post-election dismantling will be “tight”.  And, even if a new government doesn’t nobble the IFNC policy before the winning consortium goes online, funding is only for two-year pilots - few think a commercial service, if that’s what the winner has to become after funding runs out, can survive (that’s why ITV (LSE: ITV) is running away from regional news). It’s here that the bidders diverge…

Asked if the winner will need “soft money” forever, Wales24’s Jones conceded: “The likelihood is that we will. It would be foolish to believe that, within two years, the (economy) has changed that suddenly there’s enough money to provide the service going forward.”

Taliesin’s Jones was more confident, albeit quietly, that funds other than the DCMS will be available: “The viability of the IFNCs will be dependent on them finding hybrid funding which rules out the need for public spending. We’re only on the journey on what revenue streams might open up. We will mine all those things. I’m not going to go in to it - it’s confidential but there is an ability to look in to different forms of money. We are hoping to energise those in Wales ... to get over that threshold of being profitable rather than just being doomed to suffer the forces of the market.”

And WalesLive’s Wilson was bucking the trend: “Wales has more chance of being sustainable than the other regions (Scotland and Tyne Tees/Borders). There’s potetial funding from S4C that could become available.” That won’t be popular with the Welsh-language broadcaster.

But all that’s in the future, and may never come to pass. Until then, the bidders are making the right noises about spreading their online content back to the public that’s due to fund it…

Taliesin’s Jones: “We’re not running a social enterprise or a cooperative - but will we make our material available to any blogger, school or university that wants to use it for a not-for-profit basis? Yes.”

Wales24’s Jones: “We will deliver it free of any copyright constraints.”

And WalesLive’s Wilson: “If we can get WalesLive in to every blog and website in Wales, the model will be commercially sustainable for us as well.”

But, despite their own prolific use of the phrase “citizen journalism”, all three bidders - when asked by paidContent:UK, ended up playing down the term…

Wilson: “We get bogged down by ‘citizen journalism’ - a good newsroom uses its audience in many ways. We will have trusted citizen journalist who potentially require some moderation.”

Wales24’s’ Jones: “I almost think it would be a mistake, at this stage, to overdefine ‘citizen journalism’. “We’re providing a platform on which people can build their views, complaints about their community - we’re looking to give that platform whilst also not saying ‘this is citizen journalism’, or ‘this isn’t’.”

And Taliesin’s Jones: “You only have to listen to any radio phone-in to know what citizen journalism is. We’re going to have a content fund whereby we will work and empower people in local comms to tell their own stories. We will have reporters work with them.”