24 reasons why Pont Abraham petrol prices are part of our national identity

Dylan Moore explains how Cwlwm is different from other websites in Wales

In a previous life, not so long ago, my job involved analysis of Wales’ media, hearing regularly from those who use it, those who work in it, and those who know a lot about it, and making recommendations for how it could be improved. 

One of the things I heard most often while doing this work was that Wales’ media is ‘weak’, that it doesn’t do a good enough job of reflecting life as it is lived back to the people who read and watch and in many other ways ‘consume’ its content. 

And if there is any one type of content that symbolises ‘the problem’ of an unfit-for-purpose Welsh media sector, it is most often held to be the ‘listicle’, a form of journalism as much maligned as it is enjoyed. 

Pont Abraham Services in 2008 (keith morris / Alamy Stock Photo)

Much has been written, including by me, about the erosion of ‘real’ journalism, and particularly the shareholder-driven business models that have skewed the industry and hastened its decline. 

‘Listicles’ are, as is evident in the name, a halfway house between an article and a list. The simplicity of their form makes them relatively easy to churn out, and so they are also often cited as a form of ‘churnalism’ – part of a wider pattern of practice centred on producing high volumes of unoriginal stories reliant on regurgitated press releases rather than fact checking and research. 

Ten years ago, Wales Online published an article called ‘18 things English people won’t know unless they’ve lived in Wales’. It was viewed 3.5 million times, meaning the article has been ‘read’ by more people than our entire population. (I place ‘read’ in inverted commas because the ‘article’ is actually an image gallery featuring meme-like slides with inane slogans like ‘Buses are always driven by a man called Drive’).

Photo by Taylor Floyd Mews on Unsplash

It is very easy to understand why such articles are criticised. They are not concerned with news or current affairs, they are not particularly concerned with facts, and they often rely on perpetuating stereotypes. 

Equally, it is easy to understand why these articles are popular. They are immediately comprehensible, relatable, and often tap into things you might have noticed but not thought about consciously. They often evoke nostalgia for familiar and much-loved places that have now disappeared, or remind you of people and things you haven’t thought about for a while. And of course they are often humorous, offering light relief from the ‘doom’ narratives that dominate the ‘real’ news.

It is notable too that the ‘shareable content’ we see washing around our social media feed and popping up on our phones is so often focused on aspects of identity. 

Paul Rowland, former head of web for Wales Online and author of that original piece-gone-viral, explained in an interview with Journalism.co.uk:

A lot of [our listicles] revolve around Welshness and Wales and things that make you proud to be Welsh, whether that’s great places in Wales or things that only Welsh people do. It’s all about our readership identifying themselves as being [different] to English people or people who don’t know Wales the way they do. 

Whatever your views on the prevalence and popularity of such articles, there is no doubting that the teams behind them know exactly what they are doing. By appealing to both the lowest common denominator and people’s deeply felt local and national identities, these publications are ensuring the maximum number of eyeballs are looking not only at the content but also the adverts splashing across the screen all around them.

This is now common practice across the news industry, and many once-loved organs of local news have been hollowed out to become eyeball factories staffed by junior reporters whose soul-sapping roles have been reshaped to focus entirely on content driven by ‘search engine optimisation’. Wales Online was actually an innovator in this space, borrowing the listicle form from Buzzfeed and introducing it to ‘regional journalism’.  

Here at Cwlwm, we have been inspired by new entrants to the journalism industry who are disrupting the eyeball-harvesting model. The Manchester Mill operates via Substack and has built a loyal readership of more than 42,000 in just four years, spawning sister papers in other large cities across England: the Liverpool Post, the Sheffield Tribune and the Birmingham Dispatch. These ‘papers’ have already established an excellent reputation for covering local news with integrity by attempting to ‘build a media company around readers rather than advertisers, which means focusing on quality rather than chasing clicks.’

We share this desire to focus on quality rather than quantity. But unlike the excellent Substacks mentioned above, we are not concerned with supplanting or even supplementing existing news websites. They do what they do, and we do what we do. 

Cwlwm will never bring you breaking news or the latest headlines. Only very occasionally will our content be ‘timely’ or overlap with current affairs. We are also not unduly concerned with numbers. Although we are pleased that our work is finding an audience, and are pleased to share our growing readership figures every month – we are pleased to report more than 700 subscribers – this isn’t why we write.

If we simply wanted to reach the maximum number of readers, we could churn out a listicle a day and we’d have fun doing so.

• 15 laybys where you can buy a bacon roll on the A470

• 27 Cardiff pubs you used to love that have been knocked down to build student flats

• 136 Welsh mountains you can walk up to lose your signal to get away from this nonsense. 

But our desire is not to amass subscribers for the sake of it. We are not owned by anybody else and we have nothing to sell. 

Our only interest is in connecting people and communities across Cymru. We believe in the power of stories to bring us together us in ways that are far more complex than the lowest common denominator. And so our focus is on quality: both of the writing, and of the thought behind the story. 

We are not at all snobbish about all of those aspects of life that make their way into listicles. Those pieces are popular for a reason. We simply want to dig into them in more detail.

We’re currently publishing a series of long read articles, appearing every Saturday until the end of the year. We’ve already taken you around Wales – from Cardiff to Queensferry and from Holyhead to Penrhys, Pontypridd and Cefn Fforest – and we have pieces in the pipeline from Aust and Bridgend as well as places further afield, from Serbia to New York City.

So if you’d like to appoint yourself writer-in-residence at Pont Abraham Services or explore people’s memories of Penscynor Wildlife Park, survey the takeaway landscape to identify exactly where cheese, chips and gravy country begins and ends or write about the state of traditional markets in towns across Wales, all we ask is that you do so with a high standard of writing and rigorous research as well as commitment to delving deeper into the ways in which these things interact with our identities.

That’s what we believe readers are really looking for when they click on a piece about petrol prices at a service station so boldly extortionate it has almost become loved.