Why we’re campaigning to make a difference for you
To mark the start of Journalism Matters Week, our audience and content director PAUL ROWLAND discusses the role campaigning journalism plays in making a difference to communities and individuals across South West Wales
WATCH a good television channel for long enough and it should take you through a full range of responses and emotions. You might be entertained by a chat show, informed by a news bulletin, educated by a documentary, amused by a sitcom and challenged by an in-depth interview. Answered is everything from the most crucial information by which to live your life to complete diversion to allow you to escape it.
That range of functions is exactly what our hardworking team of journalists tries to achieve every day. We’ll guide you through the day’s breaking news, and then help you make the best choice for your weekend activity with the family. We’ll scrutinise how decisions made by those in power will affect our most vulnerable communities, and how they’ll impact on you. We’ll help you understand the influences that shape your life. We’ll entertain you when you’re bored. We’ll challenge you when you’re feeling openminded. We’ll take you back in time when you’re feeling nostalgic. We’ll whisk you away when you feel like day-dreaming. And we’ll work as hard as we can to reflect Wales, its communities, its contradictions, beliefs and values, and – most importantly – its people, as they exist in 2020. Put simply, if it’s interesting to people in South West Wales, it’s interesting to us.
We’re enormously proud of what we do. For more than 100 years the evening Post has provided a trusted source of news for Wales each day – often through seismic events – and, given the march of devolution, never has this felt more important.
Plus, we are part of one of the UK’S most successful news websites in Walesonline. In August, more than 9.7 million people accessed the website’s content – up 96% from a figure of just under five million 12 months previously. And we make no apologies for looking closely at what our readers across all our platforms are reading and interacting with to help us stay relevant each and every day by reporting what matters.
We want to make a difference to our Swansea Bay community. We want to make our readers feel like the stories they read reflect their lives. We’ll cover major issues of political policy not by necessarily reporting on what politicians are saying, but by documenting the lives of those most impacted by governmental decisions.
The Post’s annual Christmas hamper campaign helped more than 900 homes last Christmas and gave 300 families a
Christmas dinner. We joined up with local MP Carolyn harris for a citywide appeal to help those in need and you – our readers – answered the call in generous style.
Coronavirus – fast becoming the defining story of our time – has required our political leaders to make life-ordeath decisions on a regular basis that nothing could have prepared them for. Scrutinising these judgements is a responsibility we take incredibly seriously. After our investigation revealed that 1,000 patients potentially carrying Covid-19 had been discharged into Welsh care homes without tests, we subsequently revealed the huge body of scientific evidence that had been largely ignored, but which could have prevented hundreds of deaths.
Alongside our investigations, we will campaign for what we believe is right. In the past 12 months, we’ve lent our weight to major national issues, like the battle to secure an overdue pay rise for nurses, who were excluded from a public sector wage increase despite the unimaginable sacrifices they had made to help the fight against coronavirus. We’ve rallied our own staff and our communities to raise awareness of the scourge of plastic pollution, and the way it is blighting all parts of Wales. And done our bit to help businesses when they reopened after the national lockdown.
Across all our reporting, we want communities and individuals everywhere in Wales to recognise their own lives in our journalism – the struggles they face, the pride they feel. These things can be entirely unique, or completely relatable. And our trained journalists, regulated by standards body IPSO, try every day to tell these stories in the best way possible.
And that means constantly pushing ourselves
harder to cover the full, diverse spectrum of communities that exist in Wales – crossing boundaries of ethnicity, disability, sexuality, gender, wealth. We’re striving to document life in our region in a way that’s genuinely inclusive.
We’ve still got a long way to go until we can confidently say we’re doing everything we can on this front, but we’re committed to making it happen. As well as covering the protests and debates that emerged following the killing of George Floyd in the USA
and the Black Lives Matter movement, we also covered stories like that of transgender teenager Willow-jayne Davies that show how much work there remains to do to ensure individuals are accepted irrespective of their sexuality or gender identity.
And we spoke to nhs workers of a variety of backgrounds on their fears about risking their lives on the Covid frontline against a disease posing a greater risk to them than their white colleagues.
It can sometimes feel hard to make a difference in our communities in the context of the relentless flow of breaking news that we cover all of every day of the year.
From court cases to global events, to community issues, long reads to news breaks, and everything in between, it can be hard to find space to ensure we’re a positive influence in our communities. But we’re committed to doing that, and we’ll keep working hard to celebrate everything that’s good about Wales, and campaigning to make it an even better place to live.