Justin Matthew Wren Lewis

• Cardiff University

This joint project is led by Media Cymru and MyWorld: two place-based research, development, and innovation (RD&I) programmes funded by UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Strength in Places Fund (SIPF), led by Cardiff University (CU) and the University of Bristol (UoB) respectively. Building on the insights and outcomes of the UK’s two leading RD&...

This report presents an economic overview of the media sector in the Cardiff Capital Region (CCR). This follows on from the 2021 Clwstwr report, which examined the period up to 2018, and showed that after a decade of strong growth, the media sector had become a key part of the Welsh economy, with Cardiff being one of the leading film and TV clust...

Although the impact of the cultural and creative industries (CCI) in terms of driving innovation and wealth creation has been widely acknowledged, the way they self-organise to create value is still underexplored. There has been growing interest in understanding CCI ‘ecosystems’, ‘spillovers’ and ‘networks’, which has put a renewed focus on differe...

We are delighted to introduce this reprint of the Special Issue of Sustainability, entitled “The Creative and Cultural Industries: Towards Sustainability and Recovery”. During the last several decades, the creative and cultural industries (CCIs) have increasingly been recognized for their role in local, regional, national and supranational economie...

We are delighted to introduce this Special Issue of Sustainability, entitled “The Creative and Cultural Industries: Towards Sustainability and Recovery” [...]

The Clwstwr programme (2018-2023) aimed to put innovation at the core of mediaproduction in South Wales - moving the Welsh media sector from strength to leadership. Clwstwr built a number of activities and interventions, investing in and supporting 118 innovation projects in the Welsh creative industries. Clwstwr’s experience and record, detailed i...

This paper argues that creative hubs are enablers and curators of intercultural dialogue. Building upon an internationally funded project bringing together creative hubs from Turkey, Greece, Serbia and the UK, research was carried out through a survey analysis across these four countries with 98 creative hubs and four workshops in co-working spaces...

Despite efforts towards reducing the negative environmental impact of the audiovisual sector, sustainability remains challenging. In this paper we address environmental sustainability in the Welsh audiovisual sector through the lens of green innovation. The mixed method study combines quantitative research measuring the adoption levels of green inn...

This Policy Brief reviews some of the current public and private initiatives in the UK and in Wales, which foster Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), and reports the results of our quantitative research on diversity in the creative industries and media sector. We provide evidence of how R&D can support EDI based on learning from the Clwstwr pr...

THIS POLICY BRIEF EXPLORES THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES SURROUNDING GREEN SCREEN SOLUTIONS AND HOW GREEN INNOVATION IN THE WELSH SCREEN SECTOR CREATES NEW POSSIBILITIES. WE DEFINE GREEN INNOVATION AS THE PROCESS THROUGH WHICH NEW PRODUCTION, SERVICES AND TECHNOLOGIES ARE CREATED, WITH THE AIM OF REDUCING NEGATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS.

In December 2021, the British Film Institute (BFI) published its latest Screen Business report (Screen Report)1, analysing how the tax relief granted to the screen sector in the UK affected stakeholders and the economy in 2019. The BFI Screen Report features granular and specific data for UK nations: the purpose of this report is to provide a summa...

Journalism faces a number of challenges: patterns of news consumption have changed and audiences for traditional news outlets are declining. In this context, we explore whether the “inverted pyramid” model – a system of news writing that arranges facts in descending order of importance, which remains predominant in journalism – is the most effectiv...

In recent years, the ecological shift from an economically driven model of arts and culture to that of an ecosystem in the creative industries determined the emergence of a range of new bottom-up, place-based networks herewith referred to as “creative networks”. This article explores how these networks can generate sustainability for local creative...

Creative networks are a relatively recent, evolving phenomenon. To date there has been little interrogation of creative networks from either a policy or academic perspective. This research is designed to enable a better understanding of these networks and their role in supporting the creative industries. The growth of the creative industries has im...

MAINSTREAM JOURNALISM IS IN THE MIDST OF AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS WHICH THREATENS NEWSROOMS, MEDIA ORGANISATIONS AND, BY EXTENSION, THE NATURE AND QUALITY OF INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO CITIZENS. THIS POLICY BRIEF INVESTIGATES HOW CREATING NEW FORMS OF STORYTELLING MIGHT INSPIRE JOURNALISM THAT IS FIT FOR THE FUTURE. This Policy Brief is built on the f...

THIS REPORT ANALYSES IN DETAIL, FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE SIZE, SCALE AND ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTION OF THE MEDIA SECTOR IN THE CARDIFF CAPITAL REGION (CCR). IT LOOKS AT THE CCR’S MEDIA SECTOR IN A UK AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT AND CONSIDERS STRATEGIES FOR MAINTAINING STRONG LEVELS OF GROWTH.

On 31 January 2020, the UK left the European Union (EU). The nature of the future relationship is currently being negotiated. It is already clear that Brexit is an unprecedented political event with potentially significant economic consequences. While there has been much discussion about certain sectors in Wales (such as fisheries), there has been...

The creative industries play a key role in the development of the Welsh economy. This report aims to begin to map the overall strength of the creative industries in Wales, so that we might begin to tell the story of a creative nation and an emerging and significant media cluster in its capital city. The creative industries are not only an importa...

On 26 March, the UK Government announced the COVID-19 Self-Employment Income Support Scheme. Freelancers play an important role in the Welsh creative economy – we calculate that there are 40,000 freelancers working in the Welsh creative industries. How have they been impacted by COVID-19 and to what extent will this scheme mitigate this impact? Cre...

This study develops a multi-method approach to analysing political information environments, exploring how media and political systems help shape people’s understanding of news. In doing so, we ask a question fundamental to democratic citizenship: how well do news media communicate political responsibility and policy differences across political sy...

The media and communications industry is not commonly considered as one of the world’s biggest climate culprits, especially compared with energy and transport. Yet the media sector is almost uniquely destructive in that it is structured to profit from creating as much electronic waste as possible through planned obsolescence. This business model re...

Is the use of think tanks ideologically balanced in BBC news and current affairs programming? This study answers this question empirically by establishing which think tanks are referenced in different BBC programming in 2009 and 2015, and then classifying them according to their ideological aims (either left, right, centrist or non-partisan). We dr...

There has been greater news industry recognition in recent years that impartiality should not be translated into simply balancing the competing sides of a debate or issue. The binary nature of a referendum campaign represents a unique moment to consider whether broadcasters have put this into practice beyond routine political reporting. This study...

Significance The use of large datasets has revolutionized the natural sciences and is widely believed to have the potential to do so with the social and human sciences. Many digitization efforts are underway, but the high-throughput methods of data production have not yet led to a comparable output in analysis. A notable exception has been the prev...

The use of data is often viewed as a potentially powerful democratic force in journalism, promoting the flow of information sources and enriching debates in the public sphere. We explore a key feature of the relationship between data and journalism, drawing upon the largest ever study of statistical references in news reporting (N = 4285) commissio...

News content analysis is usually preceded by a labour-intensive coding phase, where experts extract key information from news items. The cost of this phase imposes limitations on the sample sizes that can be processed, and therefore to the kind of questions that can be addressed. In this paper we describe an approach that incorporates text-analysis...

In this article we draw on a specific case study – the re-regulation of BBC political reporting in the nations and regions in the UK post-devolution – to compare the BBC’s interventionist, public service framework with the ‘light touch’ regime of commercial broadcasting. We carried out a content analysis of BBC Television News (where issues of accu...

The UK is one of the world’s largest military powers, enjoying consistent spending increases over the last decade. However, in recent years there has been much discussion about whether the UK armed forces are sufficiently well-resourced. Others have asked why, with no clear threat of invasion, the UK spends so much on its military. The authors exam...

The list of media outlets used in research. The table contains the name, the domain name of the online version of the outlet, the country of origin of the outlet, and the RSS feeds that were used. (0.19 MB DOC)

A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed "data-driven inquiry" in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analy...

In this article we present an application of text-analysis technologies to support social science research, in particular the analysis of patterns in news content. We describe a system that gathers and annotates large volumes of textual data in order to extract patterns and trends. We have examined 3.5 million news articles and show that their topi...

This article examines how the new political world of UK devolved politics is reported in UK-wide broadcast media. Drawing on a large-scale content analysis of 4687 news items, our study indicates that while devolution is not ignored, there remains an overwhelming focus upon England and Westminster politics. News about devolved politics or issues oc...

This article explores the growth and character of breaking news on two 24-hour news channels in the United Kingdom, Sky News and BBC News 24. Our purpose is to examine, in detail, the nature and role of breaking news and, more generally, its impact on the quality of television news journalism. We draw upon a series of content analyses of news progr...

Drawing on three media content analyses between 2004 and 2007, we examine the differences in news coverage between BBC News 24 (a public service broadcasting channel) and Sky News (a commercial provider). We explore this longitudinal data in the context of recent claims that 24-hour news channels in the UK are succumbing to the kind of decline in n...

Military spending in the USA and the UK is far in excess of defensive needs. The rationale for such spending now has little to do with defence, and is based on the capacity to intervene unilaterally and globally. This rationale, while favoured by political and military elites, has no clear popular mandate. It is here that the media play a role: not...

The suggestion that the activities of public relations professionals and news agencies help to shape news content in national and local news media is increasingly commonplace among journalists, academics and public relations professionals. The findings from this study provide substantive empirical evidence to support such claims. The study analyses...

Our analysis of 2207 domestic news reports in a structured sample of UK ‘‘quality’’ (the Guardian, The Times, the Independent and the Telegraph) and mid-market (Daily Mail) newspapers, revealed journalists’ extensive use of copy provided by public relations sources and news agencies, especially the UK-based Press Association. A political economic e...

This article argues that we need to take the democratic promise of news seriously and find ways to advance that promise. It begins by considering both the importance of news to democratic citizenship, and its failure to deliver in ways that do not compound social inequalities. It argues against more optimistic accounts of the state of democratic ci...

The article is based on the first systematic analysis of the output of 24-hour news channels in the UK. From a viewer's point of view, we argue, a 24-hour news channel can fulfil three main purposes: allowing someone to watch an up-to-date news bulletin whenever they wish; enabling a viewer to watch major live news events as they happen; or providi...

This article looks at the relationship between television coverage of the Iraq War and changes in British public opinion towards the war. During the war, television coverage helped create a climate in which pro-war positions became more relevant and plausible. This was not the result of crude forms of bias, but the product of news values which priv...

Based on the largest content analysis of its kind, this article analyses the ways in which public opinion and citizenship is referenced or invoked on television news in the United States and Britain. The study is discussed in the context of the debate about declining citizen participation in representative politics. One of the study's main findings...

The MMR vaccine became front-page news in early February 2002, in a much reported controversy about alleged links between MMR and autism. We examine both media content and public opinion and knowledge to explore how this controversy was presented, and, in turn, how this coverage influenced public perceptions. The news coverage of MMR was monitored...

This article examines the ideological assumptions and consequences of the media representation of public opinion through a study of television news coverage of the 2001 British general election. It discusses how a certain type of poll (the voting intention or ‘horse-race’ poll) is privileged, while other types of opinion surveys are ignored. But it...

The well publicised controversy about the safety of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine in 2002 could have real consequences for public health, as the drop in take up of the vaccine has increased the risk of disease. What role has the media had in this process? To what extent — as some have claimed — did the media mislead the public about...

The goal of media literacy is to help people become sophisticated citizens rather than sophisticated consumers. The authors argue against a purely ‘text-centred’ approach in which media texts can be deconstructed and analyzed so we can choose among them. Instead, media literacy should integrate a textual analysis with questions of production and re...

Argues that one of the defining features of TV news is the absence of narrative codes in its structure. Rather than raising the questions it later resolves, TV news has a disjointed structure that makes it hard to follow or comprehend. It is suggested that the lack of a narrative structure exercises a form of control by default: the narrative posit...