Gary Raymond co-founded Wales Arts Review in 2012. It was born out of a conversation in a pub during half-time of a football match that was on the tele. Twelve years later, Wales Arts Review is read all around the world by hundreds of thousands of people. It has published the finest writers and artists of several generations that Wales has produced, and on a stunning range of topics. Over the next few weeks, this series will aim to explore and celebrate the life of the magazine.
If you missed the full introduction to this series, you can find it here.
This is a wider question about consumers and internet content providers. When you started out WAR was free or, in the Guardian’s euphemism, ‘open'. Back then there was a genuine assumption in a certain type of reader that they shouldn’t have to pay to read stuff online. In the course of its history, was WAR enabled or hampered (or both) by the righteous credo that content should cost nothing?
This is an excellent question, and one I’ve talked about a few times at live panel events over the years in my role as WAR editor. The struggle to monetise journalism is something of an absurdity, seeing as it’s actually a question of trying to remonetize something the industry gave up for free in 1990s. I read an article about this years ago that put the blame firmly with Alan Rusbridger, who drove a policy when editor of the Guardian to leave everything free on their website as it chased the American dollar. The article goes into detail and is very convincing, and I’m sorry I don’t have the time to find it and go into more detail here. But I subscribe to its conclusions.
For the nasty taste the name Rupert Murdoch leaves in the mouth, I cannot deny he did the right thing by paywalling his online newspapers. I’m pretty sure the readership of the Times actually went up after the paywall was established (If you can find stats to controvert that I’ll post them in a future newsletter).
As for WAR, we existed in a world created for us by the big guns. Had we been around for a few decades already and had paid subscribers, like Planet and New Welsh Review, we wouldn’t have been free to read. But we decided (and this was Phil Morris’ drive) that we would make what we saw as a very Welsh commitment to cultural debate and knowledge and light - libraries give us power etc etc - and to make a virtue of the fact we were providing a cultural service, and so what we published would be free regardless of anyone’s financial situation. If you could get online, you could read Wales Arts Review. Phil was very clever about it. This wasn’t about struggling in the world of demonetised journalism, this was about an intellectual ideology that had a tradition in Welsh life going back a few hundred years. We were to be the modern version of that.
The problems came when we began to make that argument to those who funded us and they didn’t see fit to give us the relatively small sums of money we were arguing for. I honestly feel now, as we pack up boxes and dust down shelves, that for all is successes in the 12 years we lived, Wales Arts Review is one of the great missed opportunities of Welsh cultural history. It would have cost under a hundred grand a year for it to flourish and grow and go from strength-to-strength. But nobody was ever willing to give it a go. Ironically, of course, now WAR is closing, Planet has closed, New Welsh Review is done, the Books Council is offering £80,000 to anyone who wants to set up a brand new magazine. I mean my eyes cannot roll back far enough into my head on that one. The most WAR ever had was £27,500pa from them, even though at various points we had given detailed business plans asking for £55,000-67,000. I don’t know how much Planet and NWR got (it’s public record somewhere) but it was much much less than £80,000. We’d all been asking for funding up to £80,000 for years and been turned down.
To go back to the core of the question, WAR’s free-to-read policy was a product of the world WAR was born into. We tried to make a case for it being a positive (and Welsh) thing. Our many attempts over the years to create subscriber areas or structures failed. Our readership figures were huge, meaning people loved to read us, and they were growing year-on-year including the period of our closure. We were increasing readership globally when we closed - remember that. Nobody in Wales was willing to find a way to keep an extremely successful international cultural enterprise going. And it would have costed pennies.
It comes down to this: the readership was not willing to pay for WAR in numbers that would have sustained us. The reasons for that are deep and cultural and modern and not the fault of WAR. So, we decided to make an argument that WAR should be looked at as a publicly-funded cultural service. I think we made that argument very convincingly. We were mind-bogglingly cost-efficient, high quality, far-reaching, and relevant. But we could not get anyone to budge on the funding. And, in the end, I couldn’t even get the Books Council to even reply to my emails.
In late 2022, I had a meeting with then Chair of the Arts Council of Wales, Phil George. We talked for nearly three hours, in his office, about the challenges facing Wales Arts Review - a robust, excellent, mature debate that I think about often as the kind of standard for such discussions I’d like to think, but doubt, goes on all the time in the corridors of power. After several hours, though, I realised that Phil George had been under the impression I was talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, rather than tens of thousands. The nature of the conversation changed. It became positive. Things could be done. Phil said he was going to start some conversations about this in-house. Within a week, Phil had a health scare that sped up his retirement from post which was only a few months away anyway. I was unable to get that conversation continued. Soon the Arts Council would be deep into the Investment Review process and all Human Resources would be subsumed by it.
As I say, I think Wales Arts Review is one of the great missed opportunities of Welsh cultural history.
If you have a question for Gary Raymond about the life of Wales Arts Review email him at gary@walesartsreview.org
Thanks to Jasper Rees, author and arts journalist, co-founder of The Arts Desk, for his question.
Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years, and is currently its executive editor. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is available for pre-order and is out in May 2024 with Calon Books