Capturing Cardiff: Back to Square One

You might think a £14million development, bringing new shops and a brand new health centre to a run-down area, would have local residents and businessmen jumping for joy. Not in Butetown.

The regeneration of Loudoun Square, the heart of the Butetown – Wales’s second most deprived area – has been met with derision from local businesses, with last month’s community meeting to discuss the plans almost descending into violence.

Loudoun Square used to be a thriving area of Cardiff; harmonious and full of life. But in recent years it has deteriorated dramatically. The development of Cardiff Bay from barren dockland to plush, cosmopolitan hideout has left Butetown feeling shoved aside.

Then in January 2008, Cardiff County Council proposed a total revamp of Loudoun Square; 61 new houses and apartments, six retail units and a brand new health centre to replace the shabby surgery which stands there currently.

Health centre problems

But the development has run into a number of hurdles. Firstly, the plans for the health centre caused a furore in the local community and problems for the GPs currently operating from inside.

There were concerns about the provision being given to Dr HB Singh, who currently operates a service at Butetown with 2,000 patients, running alongside his Grangetown base. The health centre is also used by Dr Kay Saunders, who has around 3,000 patients and Dr Ravindra Tiwari, who has around 1,000.

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The original plans would have seen Dr Singh and Dr Tiwari move their practices out of Loudoun Square. But, after campaigning by residents, the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board have changed the plans to accommodate Dr Singh, while Dr Tiwari will be moving his practice to centralise in Grangetown.

Dr Singh said: “The plans were changed because of public pressure, I feel, and possibly because of changes in the way we wanted to operate.

“It has been a long, hard struggle to put people’s minds at rest but I think the local health board, working with the practices, has done that.

“There are still some issues in relation to actual accommodation in the health centre which are outstanding. I wanted to work on the ground floor and I was happy to work with Dr Saunders and Dr Tiwari for the past seven years on the same floor.

“But one thing led to another and they (the health board) decided that wasn’t possible and wanted me to shift to the upper floor, which I am not really happy with at the moment. We have got a meeting coming up and let’s see what happens.”

Retail unit problems

While the problems concerning the health centre may have been cleared-up, others are bubbling under the surface.

Loudoun Square shopkeeper Shaun Mohamed said: “There are no parking provisions in the plans. We struggle enough with parking as it is at the moment. Where are we meant to take deliveries? Where are our customers supposed to park?”

Mr Mohamed also cited a problem with the proposed layout of the new retail units. When the development is complete, there will be six shops running side-by-side along the busy Bute Street, all selling similar goods.

He said: “How are we supposed to benefit from passing trade? Also, a lot of our customers have children with them and they often run outside the shop.

“The new layout is going to make that very dangerous because cars are always tearing down the road.”

Cardiff Community Housing Association (CCHA) has been blamed for many of the problems. They have developed the plans in co-operation with the council and have confirmed rent increases for the retailers and a rearrangement of the layout in Loudoun Square which makes receiving deliveries difficult.

Kevin Protheroe, chief executive of CCHA, said: “Concerning the layout, the issues of health and safety have been considered and what is paramount here is people’s safety. But this is the same for any road with a shop front on it.

“So there must be a balance between the responsibility of parents to stop their children running in the road and a civic responsibility of the council over their traffic management.”

Mr Protheroe also tackled the problems of parking in Loudoun Square:
Kevin Protheroe on parking issues in Butetown by openingfatsman

The future

The CCHA is set to meet the local business owners in an attempt to iron-out the problems and Mr Potheroe is keen to look to the future.

He said: “Some of these people have run their businesses incredibly over a period of 40 years and I have huge respect for what they have done with those businesses and in the local community.

“We want to see those businesses not only survive but flourish. They are fundamental to what we see going forward here.

“Regeneration of this area is long overdue. It is a spot in Cardiff which is in poor physical condition, it’s not a nice environment for people to live, shop or work in and this scheme could start turning the corner for the area.”

A Tweet Too Far?

I am all for Twitter and Facebook being fun and social and even acting as a tool for getting help with stories for journalists.

But surely this is going a step too far!

A bride and groom in the United States updated their Facebook status and tweeted  from the altar as they were wed in Maryland.

“Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where a second ago she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride,” tweeted Dana Hanna.

Check out the bizarre footage below.

Google to Limit Free News Access

Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced.

Go here to read more

Album of the Decade – Contenders and Poll

Following my entry for the Album of the Decade, see below for a list of the other contenders and cast your vote in our poll.

At The Drive In – Relationship of Command – by Tom Victor

Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – by Ciaran Jones

Sufjan Stevens – Come on Feel the Illinoise – by Alex Smith

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm – by Joe Curtis

The Libertines – Up the Bracket – by James Franklin

Brand New – The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me – by Hugh Morris

Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago – by Ammelio

Daft Punk – Discovery – by Will Gilgrass

The Killers – Hot Fuss - by Nick Moore

Kings of Leon – Only By the Night - by Caroline Cook

Bright Eyes – Digital Ash in a Digital Urn - by Emma Davies

Coldplay – Parachutes - by Dan Bloom

The Strokes – Is This It - by Alfie Tolhurst

Kings of Leon – Youth and Young Manhood - by Becky Rutt

Album of the Decade – Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP

A raging argument recently emerged in the newsroom – what is the greatest album of the decade? Below is my entry and, shock horror, it is neither a generic indy band nor a ‘cool’ American singer-songwriter…

“A lot of people ask me stupid fuckin’ questions
A lot of people think that what I say on record
Or what I talk about on a record
That I actually do in real life, or that I believe in it
Or if I say that I wanna kill somebody, that
I’m actually gonna do it, or that I believe in it
Well shit, if you believe that, then I’ll kill you”

Eminem - Criminal

To a 15-year-old from a little village in South Gloucestershire, whose narrow music taste ranged barely from Blur to Oasis, American hip-hop generally meant very little.

But somehow, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP left a lasting mark on me.

Easily the most commercially successful entry on the list, Eminem’s second record became the fastest selling rap album of all time and has sold close to 20 million copies to date.

It is also, aside from perhaps the Strokes’ This Is It, the only entry on the list to have truly changed the face of pop music.

The iconic Stan, The Real Slim Shady and The Way I Am provided the soundtrack to a generation of teens.

But, to me, an angry yet reasonably well-behaved and respectful teenager, The Marshall Mathers LP gave me the opportunity of sticking two fingers up at the world from the safety of my bedroom.

Eminem is one of the great artists and The Marshall Mathers LP is his masterpiece. Album of the decade, no doubt.

“Will the real Slim Shady please stand up”

Print is Dead, Long Live Print

Falling advertising revenues and the ‘online revolution’ have placed a strain on newspapers in recent years. So, what is the solution?

Is it conceivable to consider a world with no printed media? Possibly.

Is it conceivable to consider a world without The Sun, or The Times, or Private Eye? No.

Wherever technology is taking us, these huge brands will survive; it is in what format – and more importantly, how they will make money – that is the important issue.

Newspapers have traditionally relied heavily on advertising to boost revenues. While the market for this has waned – and with it rates for page space – the online ad market paints an equally glum picture.

With advertisers often paying on a click-by-click basis, no guarentee can be made for revenue to websites. And if, as Rupert Murdoch and a handful of other believe, paywalls are the answer, then reduced traffic to websites charging for news will see a steep fall in advertising revenue.

Also, do people even want to read newspapers online? I don’t believe so. I think people are happy to read news online – having access to information at your fingertips is the Web’s great selling point – but reading opinion, or any in-depth material, online can be taxing.

An study into the New York Times’s online readership found that users spend an average of just 40 minutes on the website each month. Many spend at least that with a newspaper every day.

At present, there is simply no market for online newspapers. Advertising will not cover the costs involved in producing the copy and charging customers to visit the site will reduce traffic and, therefore, damage the brand.

But newspapers are making little to no money and printing that much paper every day will eventually become unsustainable.

So, print media may end up a thing of the past, but that day will be a while in coming.

Knocking Down the Pay Walls

After a recent lecture concerning the much debated future of journalism – whatever that means – I was a little depressed at a point made by guest lecturer Joanna Geary, web development editor for The Times. She said:

“People no longer seek news”

A worrying statement to make in front of 90 wannabe-journalists.

Case study

But, taking this thought on board, I tested the theory out in a case study – my girlfriend.

She never reads the paper. She walks out of the room when I turn on BBC News. She pays no attention when Newsbeat comes on Radio 1.

Yet somehow, whenever I come home spouting some garbage story about cricket, or something I read in the Sun about a bear eating a man, she somehow already knows. And I am terribly disappointed about it.

So, where does she get her news from?

The answer is a combination of places, and all are passive forms. Firstly, when the radio is on, and a news story with some relevence comes on, the listener takes it in – no matter how much attention they are paying. When someone is watching TV you take some of it in.

But, most of all, people talk. Face-to-face, on the phone, Facebook, Twitter…. the list goes on.

News is now everywhere so there is no need to actively seek it – which makes the Internet business model such an intruiging and scary proposition.

The question is not how do we force the customer to pay? but what are they willing to pay for?

Johnston Press

Adam Tinworth, business journalist and guest lecturer at Cardiff Journalism School, tweeted earlier today about Johnston Press’s decision to introduce a paywall for a selection of their regional titles.
This is not the way to save the local press.

People don’t want to pay for news because: i) they don’t need to any more, and, ii) they have, at best, a passing interest in most news stories.

Forcing the hand of the customer is not the way forward. People still want well written, coherent news stories and industry needs to find a way to fund it. But paywalls are not the answer.

A Visit to Wartorn Caerwent…

Before this week, the idea of war reporting seemed so alien and inaccessible to me.

A 24-hour excersise with the Royal Marines may not have completely changed my mind, but it certainly opened my eyes to the role of journalism in a warzone.

I spent Wednesday and much of Thursday at the MOD training area at Caerwent, in South Wales; living in a derelict warehouse, eating military stodge and spending seven hours embedded with 38 non-commisioned officers as they planned and executed an ambush.

While the excersise was a lot of fun and gave me a taste of the life of an embedded reporter, it most importantly gave me an insight into the view of the media from a military perspective.

Firstly, the Marines are much more politically minded than I ever imagined. Perhaps naivly, I assumed your average commando lived in such an enclosed world that politics, world affairs and Gordon Brown meant little to them.

But, as was explained to me by a Sargeant Major, the military have an active interest in Westminster:

“We see ourselves as an extention of government policies. So, if the media, and particularly the Sun, have such an influence on the electorate, and the government need to keep the electorate happy, we have a clear interest in what is being reported in newspapers.”

The military are now more keen than ever to involve the press in their day-to-day acrivities, thus giving them more control over content of war reports.

They are also serious about keeping journalists safe in the battleground. Though only a training excersise, I never once felt in any danger while out on patrol and had opportunities to get closer to the action than any freelancer ever could.

While the day didn’t exactly have me rushing for the flak jacket, it certainly made me more acutely aware of the role the media, particularly the printed press, has to play in foreign policy and the lives of Britain’s marines and soldiers.

Fear Not, Friends, We Will Be OK

Technology is changing the way people consume news.
I mean, why go to through the terrible upheaval of actually going to a shop to buy a paper? They are way too big as well. Why not just read the miniscule font on an iphone or Blackberry instead. No-one on a train will hate you for carrying an iphone.
In all seriousness, people are using new and innovative ways of reading the news and it is important for journalists – worried as we may be – to put the changes into context.
This is not the first technological advance journalism has seen. Nor is journalism the only trade to have been affected by advances in machinery and tools. Did the teacher moan when they introduced digitized class registers and interactive whiteboards? Of course they did, but they got over it and their jobs are safe.
The core skills of a journalist are still needed to produce copy people want to read. Just because news is online, or on a phone, or on a Sony Reader, the stories still need to be written. Someone has to source the story, get the interview, write it up, sub it and put the (web) pages together.
So fear not, fellow trainees, there will be jobs out there, our skills will be required. But we may not get the daily ego massage of seeing people in the street, or the cafe, or the pub, reading our work in the newspaper.

Feel the Power with Careful Choices

The internet is a magnificent toolbag, filled with a plethora of gadgets and gizmos that can bring a piece of writing or a blog post or a story to life. But journalists and photographers and bloggers and editors have to be careful with how and when they use them.

The image below, for example, requires no audio, no interactive map and no words to aid its impact.

Captured in Iraq and depicting children showing their disapproval at the war, it draws such power as a still image.

Equally, this image, of a suspected Viet Cong member being assasinated in Saigon, in 1968, truly tugs at the emotions.

However, the use of such tools as interactive maps or audio can dramatically enhance a story – particularly where a journalist has less powerful images to hand.

Maps depicting murders across a region or country, or disaster maps can make a story really hit home for a reader.

Take this map from the BBC website. It shows every murder or manslaughter of youngsters over the last 18 months. The map enhances the experience for the reader by illustrating the severity of the problem and enhancing the home-photographs which make less impact as sole images.

The technology we now have at our disposal can provide an invaluable tool, but they have to be used in the right way and at the right time.