ITV’s slow decline is well known and the broadcaster revealed the extent of the reduction in its advertising revenue this week. There is already a UK-wide £40m “regional savings” programme in the pipeline, that will be completed by 2009.

Although Wales is not at the front of the queue to completely lose regional coverage from ITV it will be hit very considerably as investment through ITV Wales is reduced: with a virtually non-existent ‘national’ press, no independent radio stations based in Wales and coverage from UK-wide media outlets that is ‘patchy’ at best.

Michael Grade, ITV executive chairman, warned this week that ITV’s £1bn programming budget could be reduced unless regulatory burdens are removed. The IWA has already identified a problem with other figures from ITV: Ofcom, the regulator, produced a spend per head figure for ITV, based on a private ITV submission in 2006. Ofcom said ITV’s spending in Wales per head was £4.30. Given the number of heads in Wales this equals about £12.9m. However, at the Assembly’s Broadcasting Committee Michael Grade said the entire cost of ITV Wales’ operations was “just over £9m”. Yet, Ofcom has already accepted in principle that ITV’s claim that its public service broadcasting costs will exceed the benefits by 2009.

Having a viable alternative in Welsh broadcasting to the current channel 3 licence arrangement is a vital bargaining chip as Wales secures plurality in broadcasting. A plan to give Channel 4 extra investment through BBC Worldwide has already been dismissed. The BBC denies the ‘excess licence fee’ that Ofcom has identified exists.

The BBC Trust chairman said in May 2008: “Some observers have spotted the BBC's fund to help elderly and disabled people get the benefits of digital switchover and come up with the bright idea that, once switchover is complete, this fund can be used for other purposes. What they don't seem to have noticed is that the fund will have been spent by the time the current licence fee settlement expires, and who knows what will happen to the licence fee after that?”

There are already other ideas on the table for Wales. Ron Jones, chairman of Tinopolis, has suggested a Welsh Public Service Broadcasting agency. Another possibility is to have a separate channel 3 licence for Wales. However, any licence holder(s) would still probably need public funding to survive. These options warrant fuller examination from Ofcom – and further debate in Wales.

The owner of the Western Mail, Wales’s sole national newspaper, is struggling. Yesterday Trinity Mirror's shares fell to around 105.75p at 4pm, down from the closing price of around 151.50p last Friday. The fall followed yesterday morning’s announcement that Trinity Mirror’s full-year operating profit would be about 10 per cent below expectations.

The reasons for Trinity Mirror’s troubles are numerous. As the IWA’s recent report, Media in Wales – Serving Public Values, showed circulations have fallen dramatically, even since the inception of the National Assembly in 1999. Its circulations continue to slide. Advertising is a regional newspaper’s lifeblood and in the case of Media Wales (Trinity Mirror's company in south Wales) it has been bleeding away thanks in part to the consumer slowdown affecting both classified and display advertising and to wider challenges, including technological developments. Central to its plight, however, is shareholder pressure - the pressure to grow profit every year. In television ITV plc is scaling back its regional output across the UK thanks again to the pressure of the shareholding model. Its shares have also taken a battering in recent years, falling from 115.0p a year ago to around 47.5p last Friday. As the financial screw tightens for ITV the decline of regional programming is accelerated.

The lesson to draw from the (mis)fortunes of Trinity Mirror and ITV plc is that the conventional shareholder model just does not seem appropriate for media organisations that have such an important public service role. Choice is important for the citizen: it can promote healthy competition and media plurality; and, most importantly, gives the citizen democratic power. Whatever system we have in place must allow the citizen democratic power to choose.

Yet, in recent years many in and around the media industry have have tended to focus - perhaps too much - on plurality of media ownership rather than plurality of output. At the moment only the BBC seems immune to shareholder cost pressures. The BBC stands as the exception, with its funding by the licence fee. In Wales the BBC is the only national radio service and, if ITV plc's decline continues, could be the only player in television media as well. This surely cannot be healthy for Welsh democracy.

Following the local election earlier in May 2008 most of the UK-wide media have shifted their attention to the upcoming Crewe and Nantwich by-election to read New Labour's runes for a future UK general election. The seat is being contested following the death of Gwyneth Dunwoody MP.

The story in England was largely one of Conservative resurgence and the party has also made considerable gains in Wales. There are, however, extra dimensions to the Welsh results. The Assembly election in May 2007 provided the first Wales-wide hints that pluralism had entered Welsh politics. There was much evidence in the Welsh local elections of May 2008 to suggest this state of affairs will continue for some time yet. The IWA's Director, John Osmond, has produced an analysis of the 2008 local elections in Wales, available here as a PDF (92k).