Author: Phil Baillie

Cardiff Protests Against Spending Cuts

Cardiff Business News

Hundreds of protesters gathered in Cardiff City Centre today to demonstrate against the spending cuts announced by Chancellor George Osborne last week.

Just three days after Mr Osborne announced cuts in his Comprehensive Spending Review, which will see capital spending allowance for Wales drop by £1.8bn over the next four years, around 300 members from the trade unions in Cardiff and members the public protested outside Cardiff City Hall.

Katrine Williams, chair of the PCS union in Wales and one of the main organisers of the protest, told the BBC poorer people were most vulnerable to the cuts, as well as public sector workers.

She said: “There are more people on benefits in Merthyr Tydfil than there are jobs in the whole of Wales.”

Protesters waved placards and banners as they walked from Cardiff City Hall along Castle Street towards Bute Park. They shouted out slogans calling for the banks to pay to protect public services, saying that the poor had been affected the most by the cuts.

Representatives from the main trade unions in Cardiff the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), The Teachers Trade Union (NASUWT), The General Trade Union (GMB), the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), the Newport Passport Office and others spoke at a rally in Bute Park after the procession.

Many protesters called for the Welsh Assembly to reject the cuts.

But Neil McEvoy, Deputy leader of Cardiff Council, said rejecting the cuts would mean the the Council would face a surcharge from the government.

At the end of the protest, Ms Williams said: “I am pleased with today’s protest.” She said the demonstration helped raise awareness of the spending cuts and that people would gradually begin to take part.

The next major protest has been announced by the TUC. It said a national demonstration will be held on 26 March next year in London’s Hyde Park.

Capturing the lives of others

Cardiff Media Blogs

“Where are you from?”

Dr Daniel Meadows, documentarian, photographer, presenter, author, Bafta winner and lecturer at JOMEC asked Post-graduate students this simple question. There was a pause before he showed us a 2 minute digital documentary about his family history.

Since the democratisation of media, almost everyone now has the opportunity to perform on the stage of online media. The internet has allowed people like Dr Meadows to create a trade of digital storytelling, employing tools such as still shots and people’s memories to build up a picture of what Wales looks like in 2010 through the lives of others. And this new type of media is immensely important.

Bur Dr Meadows emphasised, “A person interacts through the use of tools he actively masters.”

If a person does not master these tools, he argues, that person becomes powerless as a receiver of media. “History is the story of the victorious,” he added.

Is this the case for contemporary journalism?

If journalists empower themselves with digital media, they could save print journalism from decay, a constant undermining issue lurking in the back of any head of regional media boss.

BBC Wales were convinced of the value of this type of media and commissioned Dr Meadows to tour the country in a truck, to document people’s lives, empowering them to tell their own story. “It’s a collaborative project, it’s about the person’s story, he said.”

It takes around 30 hours to prepare a 2 minute video, which is often effective with a series of still pictures and a voice-over.

The medium of digital storytelling can be especially useful to provide a visual account of how process work, especially important when explaining complex financial processes.

For example, BBC’s Business Correspondent, Robert Preston, has used the platform to explain how the banks work.

But to document news, the platform of digital storytelling would not be the most effective. Editing even a short piece can be time consuming and therefore difficult in a newsroom context.

Perhaps the best use of digital storytelling is for features, explaining complex concepts and documenting case studies.

And with the democratisation of information and media on the internet, the Journalist could appeal for people to add their own videos.

Osborne’s Tough Medicine

Cardiff Business News

Public sector workers, business leaders and members of the public had been waiting with bated breath for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osborne, to pronounce a series of spending cuts across the public sector today.

And at 12:30pm, an unflinching Mr Osborne presented the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) to the house of Commons, announcing his tough medicine to treat Britain’s chronic budget deficit.

The Chancellor said: “It is time to draw the country back from the brink of bankruptcy.”

But before laying out the specifics of where his axe would fall, Mr Osborne attempted to justify the cuts.

In a nutshell, the budget deficit – the amount of money the UK government is falling short of its annual expenditure forcing it to borrow to make up the difference – currently stands at £109bn. This is the highest of any European country, and today the Chancellor called upon the name of the IMF to back up his assessment of the UK economy.

But  Mr Osborne revealed a worrying statistic that the government currently spends £44bn a year on paying interest on net government debt (the total amount of money the British government owes to the private sector and other purchasers of UK gilts), calculated in October 2010 at £952.8bn.

Currently government debt is 64.6% of GDP. The HM treasury has published some slides to illustrate the acuteness of the debt problem. (See slide 3)

Following years of perusing a policy of Keynesian economics (spending ones way out of a recession), championed by Gordon Brown, the government has now decided to tackle the deficit with spending cuts in a move towards fiscal consolidation.

The government’s pot for capital spending, which deals with annual spending budgets, will be reduced from £51 in 2011 to £47bn by 2014.

These cuts will see  local government shrink by 27%, the environment by 29% and 23% from the Home Office. The Department of Media, Culture and Sport is to be reduced by 24% while the Ministry of Justice will see their budgets cut by 6% a year.

Apart from capital spending welfare will be cut by £7bn, while the state pension age will rise to 66 by 2020, saving up to £5bn by brining the date of implementation forward by six years. But even before today’s review, around £28bn of cuts were announced in the emergency budget in June.

The most alarming figure is that 490,000 jobs will go over the next four years, although Mr Osbourne argued this will be implemented gradually through natural turnover, that is, not replacing retired employees in the workplace.

In total, Mr Osborne’s tough medicine is to cut £81bn over the next four years.

But in reaction to the CSR, there are fears that the cuts are too deep, and rather than curing a disease of debt, efficiency savings will actually increase unemployment while cuts in certain areas could put national security at risk.

Shadow Home Secretary, Ed Balls said:

“They go way beyond what can be achieved through efficiency savings and better procurement. Cuts to the funding of border controls and counter-terrorism policing risk weakening our defences against threats to our national security. The Home Secretary has abjectly failed to fight the corner of the police in these Spending Review negotiations.”

And in Wales, where I will be investigating the effects of the cuts in the next few weeks, BBC Wales correspondent Nick Severini said:

“It’s often said that Wales has a public sector culture. Not only does it employ 27% of the workforce, but the spending power of those workers and contracts with the public sector are essential for so many companies in the private sector. These range from large construction firms, which rely on contracts for half of their work, to small firms like the appropriately named Kutz N Kurlz hair salon in Brynmawr in the south Wales valleys, where a third of all the customers are directly employed by the public sector. That’s why organisations like the Federation of Small Businesses in Wales are deeply concerned about the threat of a double dip recession.”

So although many of these figures from today’s review may seem removed from the present, many people in Cardiff will be affected by the cuts. This blog seeks to trace the effects of the CSR on the public sector and will look at how the private sector reacts to create new jobs, as policy makers hope it will. And there is no doubt that protests will follow; the first large protest has already been organised for 12pm this Saturday.

Social Media and the future of journalism

Cardiff Media Blogs

Labour Politician Harold Wilson once said: “He who rejects change is the architect of decay.”

BBC social media trainer, Dr Claire Wardle (@cward1e), told JOMEC post-grads at Cardiff University last week about some of the changes facing Journalism. It certainly seems that if Journalism (especially print journalism) does not change soon, it will begin to decay.

Social media is changing ‘news’ as we know it, bringing a new level of immediacy to the consumer while new technology has blown the traditional economic model of news to shreds.

It allows companies and famous personalities to leap-frog the traditional methods of news transmission. Just take the rise of Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and other online phenomena that have allowed news seekers to obtain what they want to know about directly. I can think of at least one example this week when Dmitri Medvedev and Arnold Schwarzenegger broadcast humorous exchanges on twitter about working out. http://twitpic.com/2wpsuz

Eighty-five per cent of people in the UK have access to the Internet, and have free, unlimited and direct access to news that they want: they can follow their favourite celebrity on twitter or check the stock exchange on an iphone application. As the number of people reading newspapers falls, so does income, and subsequently advertising. The economic model of print media is crumbling.

But does this mean social media eradicates the need for a journalist to interpret what is going on in the world?

Traditionally, the journalist has written stories in a particular house style, often in narrative form, having obtained news from public, official and private sources.

But now, with so many alternative generators of news such as hyperlocal blogs and tweets, one could argue that the modern journalist is just another Internet user, presenting lists of facts wrapped in prose. Some might say the only distinguishing features of journalists are that they write in a prescribed news style for a particular organisation and get paid to do so.

Yet there is still a need for professional journalism.

For a start the internet is chaotic.

Social media does not construct news in an authoritative or organised structure. It is unstructured, unchecked and often unreliable.

Secondly, the immediacy of social media means that people miss out the ‘big picture’ of news if they are not up to date with what has been happening previously.

In a blog about the future of media, Media Consultant Michelle McLellan had this to say:

“Journalists would be better suited by developing skills to fill the information gaps, offering broader perspective and context on the information, and fostering conversation around it.”

Thirdly, social and online media can equip the modern journalist with some extremely powerful tools to educate and involve communities.

In fact, Dr Claire Wardle said that the powers of social media will not drive journalists out of the news production process. Instead, social media can make their jobs easier for connecting people, collating sources and developing interactive news.

So perhaps the most important function of the contemporary journalist is to involve communities in a bigger picture; one that is polyphonic and constantly changing. Journalists can use facebook to find case studies, twitter to collect statements from celebrities or political figures and quote blogs for local news. It involves the same roles as traditional journalism: only now there are more sources available and there is more transparency.

While there are many positives to bring out from the changes in journalism one fundamental question remains:

How can journalists develop profitable models for on-line media to ensure the survival of professional, balanced and transparent news?

What is Social Media? http://slidesha.re/bb1ydV

Vadim Lavrusik on The future of Journalism, Michelle McLellan: http://mashable.com/2010/09/13/future-social-media-journalism/

Claire Wardle http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/skills/citizen-journalism/citizen-journalism-guide/social-media-tools.shtml

What is Entrepreneurship?

Cardiff Business News

By the time he was 11, a London boy named Alan Sugar started his career selling rags to a scrap merchant. Although the merchant swindled the young Mr Sugar by handing him half a crown for what turned out to be wool, rather than £1.10, he was beginning to develop something known as the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.

The Apprentice
Can anyone replicate his success?

By the age of 15 he bought a camera and started selling pictures of children in his neighbourhood to parents and grandparents, making some extra cash on the side while studying. But to the horror of his parents he left school early to work in a factory. His story is one of rags to riches, from the back streets of Croydon to heart of London, Southbank. Today he is arguably the most iconic self-made man in the UK.

But with so much media talk of entrepreneurship – a clear ideology of the coalition government – as the “Big Society” begins a process of decentralisation and looks to create space for new business start-ups to take the flack of the recession, it has made me question, what does it mean to be “entrepreneurial”? And is it the way forward?

Just two days ago at the Cardiff business club, another celebrity entrepreneur and politican Lord Heseltine spoke of his journey to success in his early days after graduation from Oxford. Of course he faced uncertainty. He had to start out somewhere, eventually becoming one of the most successful publishing moguls of our time. Lord Heseltine said he started out with £1000 in his pocket and began his entrepreneurial journey by renting a 9 bedroom flat with a friend and letting it out for a small profit. The pair then moved their business into a hotel. A snowball effect culminating in the genesis of Haymarket with a friend from university.

What can we learn about entrepreneurship from these two men? The lesson I took was to make the most of a little. There were many times when projects failed. Heseltine’s magazines, <emMan about town and Topic were a flop and Lord Sugar nearly lost his fortune with the demise of Amstrad. But persistence, resilience and some luck managed to pull them through.

The Oxford dictionary defines entrepreneurship as characterized by the taking of financial risks in the hope of profit. But is entrepreneurship solely about taking risks and making profit? Perhaps it is about having a sense of commercial awareness, resourcefulness, energy, creativity and an understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses. So when a spot of luck comes your way, you are ready to make the most of it. And perhaps the best outcome is to benefit society with the by-product of some profit.

Perhaps part of his success is down to the fact that he is not afraid to be himself. What you see is what you get.