Capturing Cardiff: The Night-time Economy

Cardiff is a city that thrives on its nightlife. If you walk along St. Mary Street on any given Friday or Saturday night, you’ll witness an array of people merrily enjoying their weekends and most importantly for business owners - spending their cold, hard cash.

The capital city of Wales is littered with nightclubs, bars, pubs and clubs that really only come alive after hours and feed into the economy of Cardiff. During the day, you can be forgiven for missing them as their lights, music and well dressed door staff only spring into action at night.
It’s not just the watering holes that drip feed the city’s bank balance though. In amongst all the action, are the countless takeaway outlets, restaurants, amusement arcades and of course the endless taxis that parade the streets night after night. There’s no shortage of activity in the city after dark.

In fact, one group of Christians have cottoned onto the fact that there is so much activity at night and are ‘doing their bit’ to encourage sensible behaviour.

Tourism is obviously a vital part of Cardiff’s economy - as the capital city of Wales, it relies on tourists and visitors to bring money into the area. In fact, 20% of the city’s employers are from the tourism and retail trade. So it’s not surprising that so much effort is being poured into ‘social hubs’ to give the night-time spender what they’re looking for.


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The Bay is a particularly unique part of Cardiff and certainly a hive of activity at night. Those running businesses in this area definitely benefit from revellers. Choosing to spend an evening in the bay means that you can watch a film, go for dinner and have a few drinks in one of the area’s swanky bars. So there’s nothing short of something to do and the night-time economy here is certainly thriving.

It also attracts a very different spender by night; in the daytime, the streets of the bay are awash with families at the Dr.Who exhibition, or tourists admiring the Wales Millennium Centre. By night though, it attracts the young professionals who want to unwind, drink fancy cocktails and quite literally dispose of their income.

St. Mary Street in the centre of Cardiff is another street which transforms when the sun goes down. In a busy afternoon it’s filled with rushed shoppers and people ‘doing coffee’. At night though, party goers from Cardiff and the Valleys descend on the street to spend their well earned money.


For people from the Valleys particularly, money is no object at the weekends, it's a chance to let their hair down and escape their working lives and they’re not concerned about how much they spend. So they’ll hop from club to club, buying round after round of drinks and ending their night with a greasy takeaway and probably an expensive taxi home.
But for those people, expense is no object because the night-time is their escapism, a different world from their daily lives.


City Road is another popular destination for hungry folk craving a takeaway. It’s a street which is end to end with Chinese, Indian, Italian, Portugese, Mexican, Kurdish, and British take out-food. Again though, in the day-time, it’s closed signs and lights off. The night-time really is where these businesses make their money.


The night-time economy is exciting and different though - it offers us an alternative to what we can spend our money on in the daytime and this is largely why these businesses cash in after hours. We wouldn’t want to visit a club or have a kebab at two in the afternoon. We want to spend our money in a different way when the sun goes down and this is what hugely contributes to the economy of Cardiff.

Listen to more about Cardiff's night-time economy here:

And now for the news....

Rory Cellan-Jones is someone who knows what makes good T.V. journalism. His lecture provided a fascinating insight into how television news used to be and makes us even more aware of how far we’ve come with technology and how it really impacts on good journalism.

In the 80’s, there were few moving pictures to help tell a story – they heavily relied on stills to inform the report. . The video Rory showed us wasn’t that dissimilar to the portrayal of T.V. News in the film ‘Anchorman’. Thankfully this didn’t last long and we soon had moving images being used to aid the narrative of T.V. news reports.

Fast forward to 2008 though – and we now have very different tools to make the news. User generated content has been as massive factor in news broadcasters' output. Why wait for a cameraman from broadcasting house to travel twenty miles to a news story, when you could use Joe Bloggs’ pictures – who was actually at the scene? Initially anyway, this is a huge development in broadcasting – if Joe Bloggs was there first, use his material and then broadcast the quality pictures later.

Tools like Twitter enable us to break news stories quickly and for masses of people to have them pop up on their desktops instantly. In fact, during Rory’s lecture, the news broke that Roy Keane had left Sunderland. Now, without a T.V. or radio being switched on in the room, we wouldn’t have known that information. This is how people want the news to be broken to them; as it happens.

I’m not sure it would’ve really mattered if we had found this information out till after the ninety minute session though – perhaps we’re becoming a little too reliant on technology to feed us with a constant stream of information and sometimes it’s nice just to ‘switch off’. Maybe so – but at least these tools give the choice to the consumer, if they don’t want to use them, they don’t have to.

It’s been said several times during our online journalism workshops, that we don’t know in which ways news is moving – but these tools can only help rather than hinder newly trained journalists and it's something we should definitely embrace.

My Brand's Bigger Than Yours

An interesting question has come out of the recent economic crisis or ‘credit crunch’ as was the buzz phrase of the moment: How big a brand is a journalist? Throughout the economic turmoil that’s unfolded over previous months, Robert Peston has become a household name – reporting several times a night on the BBC News, and on Radio 4 and Radio 5Live, his face and voice were rarely off the screen. But – interestingly, he was breaking a lot of the stories he was receiving through his blog, rather than on T.V./Radio. With these mediums, he has to wait for designated slots before he puts the information into the public domain – but with a blog, he can do it instantly.

But how big a brand did Robert Peston actually become?

For many, it reached a point

where he was the story and he has too much power

– many people tuned in to see if Peston would pop up rather than what the latest economic or financial news would be. Is Peston bigger than the BBC though? My guess is not. He’s able to break the stories and find the interviewees that he does because he’s part of such as massive Broadcasting Corporation. If the BBC did not have the platforms for him to break such stories – i.e. a rolling news channel, several national radio stations, and hugely popular network news programmes then ‘Peston: the brand’ certainly wouldn’t have grown to the extent it had.

There’s no doubt that people do rely on high profile journalists to tell them what’s going on in the world. We expect Nick Robinson to tell us what’s happening in the political world, we depend on Julian Manyon to bring us a well put-together, sensitive report from a war zone. They’re faces, names, and voices that people trust. It’s not just high profile journalists though – every word that is written or broadcast, the public rely on to be free from bias and personal views – this is naturally more true for broadcast rather then print media. This is why responsible journalism is so crucial – particularly the ‘power’ it brings with it. However, there is a very fine tipping point between reporting the story and being the story.

Me, Myself and I

'My Telegraph’; part of the Telegraph website exemplifies perfectly the new wave in modern journalism. It’s a portal which is completely adaptable to an individual’s interests and tastes. No two ‘my telegraph’ sites are the same. This is the way news seems to be moving in the present day. With RSS feeds dropping personalised news straight to your desktop, users can get their news that they want, when it happens. As great as this sounds, it’s also, a little worrying. If individuals are allowed to decide what new they want, or think they want, there’s a very real danger that they’ll be missing out on much of the information, that they really need. This is a particular worry, I think with RSS feeds; selecting just certain types of news for example just education, health or sport, then many people really are not consuming as much news as they should.


I certainly don’t think that we need to go back to the ‘good old days’ of journalism with the journalist being the all seeing, all knowing dictator. But surely there must be a limit to how much news consumers can control what they want to know.


Shane Richmond from The Telegraph made some excellent points about online journalism, particularly in regards to legal worries. It’s a known fact by now that anyone can publish information on the internet, so for high profile court cases, such as the case of ‘Baby P’, it’s difficult to moderate what people put on the internet and Shane pointed out that the law is going to have to change to keep up with the massive expansion of the internet. The web is a global medium, not bound just by U.K. jurisdiction and successfully moderating content is almost impossible. The ‘don’t read it all’ attitude to blogs and comments is certainly not something I completely agree with or comfortable with, if users are going to be given the freedom to say what they want, we still need responsible journalists to moderate this effectively to protect individuals. But it’s a great and exciting time for newspaper journalists – being given the freedom to really engage with what your readers think is what journalists should be doing.

What's it all about?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO sounds fancy - and for once, for a technical term, it is. It allows those entering information onto the internet to have this information sourced and found easily by others. Huge search engines like Google will pick up on articles, data, videos, or other material if keywords have been tagged along with this information. This naturally leads quite well into journalism; a journalist’s job, is fundamentally to educate and inform. So with the increasing number of media being put online, it’s vital that journalists know how to attract people to their material.

Take Flickr, for example. I needed to use this tool yesterday to find a picture and searched several different keywords to find what I was looking for – the result? Most of it had nothing to do with what I was actually looking for. The tags had all been attached by users of the site, and from what I found pretty much included any tag to any random image, just to have their picture flash up to anyone and everyone. This isn’t particularly useful. It’s vital therefore that journalists and people putting information on the internet use the right ways to attract attention to it. There’s no doubt that the internet provides a sea of information, but if anyone is allowed to access and change this, then it’s impossible to swim seamlessly through the information.

But for huge media organisations, such as the BBC, it’s a necessity to flag up articles in the right way in order to attract traffic to the website. So, if the Pope died and someone wanted to Google this, then keywords such as “pope” and “death” would need to be included, it seems fairly simple. But getting it right is crucial in pulling more people into your website and allowing the user to navigate around it.

All this, is of course, tied up with the previous lectures on network journalism – tools like SEO need to come together to make online journalism work.

Stop, Rewind, Play.

So once again we hear about how important blogging is in the media, and how it’s becoming and important tool for journalists. Adam Tinworth is someone who clearly believes in the value of blogging; he has several himself. There clearly is a very real value to blogging, it allows for commentary and discussion on news stories, rather than just chucking the facts at the consumer. The phrase ‘two-way conversation’ definitely has a place here. It allows healthy debate and awareness of issues surrounding stories, rather than just telling the bare facts. This then follows on to making people more culturally aware and maybe even more sensitive to certain issues.

However, I think their importance and how popular they are is being exaggerated by some. Do people really have time to ready X,Y and Z’s blog? Do they really engage with it to a great extent? Or do they just scan through them to get a general overview? Does any of this even really matter?

Also, is this really that new? Newspapers have carried commentary and letters pages pretty much since their birth – the only real difference now is that the feedback by consumers is much more instant and the writers have to sit up and take notice. The comments are right in front of their screen; they can’t hide from them.

However, I particularly took issue with Adam’s comments that ‘now we can break news when it happens’. Well, broadcast news has always done this.

Rolling news channels were a great step forward in providing 24/7 news but radio bulletins before this were even more up to date than print media. With bulletins on the hour, half hour and during peak times, headlines every 15 minutes, broadcasters have always been able to break news as it happens. I understand that he’s coming from a print background, but this newspaper-centric view, is perhaps a little naïve. Online media and websites are revolutionary for print journalists, because they really can now break news stories much more quickly than they ever have done – but this isn’t new for everyone and its importance shouldn’t be overplayed.

The Power To Publish

Everyone’s now a journalist. The internet has created a phenomenon in which everyone has the power to publish, apparently. Replying to blog posts, submitting UGC, uploading a YouTube video; all of these are mediums through which anyone and everyone can publish.

As young journalists starting in this industry we increasingly need to become facilitators of this content and be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, this is a great thing. The two- way storytelling is something journalists should do more; let the public tell their story.

However, we also need to be careful about how often we use this content. As this website mentions we’re not all really journalists. There is still a great need to have people who know what they’re talking about, and can communicate in an effective manner. It also goes without saying that these posters and contributors, largely, operate outside a legal framework.

A large amount of this communication is also about ‘knowing your audience’. As Matthew Yeomans says on his website, ‘Custom Communication’, internet publication is about knowing how to use the right media to connect to your audience.

I still maintain that this type of online publication has a long way to go, and it’s very much a generational thing.

My parents and extended family members for example still turn to their T.V., radio or newspaper to get the information they want. In all honesty, I do too. This is because I trust the people telling me these stories.
It’ll take a long time to convince many of these types of people to use ‘new media’ and to fully embrace these new tools.

No-one, it seems has any idea where the media is moving.

Images thanks to : http://www.masternewmedia.org/