A recruitment drive has begun at Radio Carmarthenshire – the new local Welsh station 51 per cent owned by Radio Pembrokeshire – after it was awarded an FM licence by the Radio Authority last week.
Anne Wilson, news editor at Radio Pembrokeshire, will oversee establishment of the bilingual station’s newsroom. She will also be charged with recruitment in the run-up to the station’s proposed launch by spring next year.
According to managing director Keri Jones, journalists will need intimate knowledge of the area, and will preferably have worked on the local newspaper, but he said it was too early to know the number of appointments likely to be made.
Radio Pembrokeshire, which already covers some of the neighbouring Carmarthenshire area, has three full-time journalists and a number of part-time reporters.
“The difficulty we have is that because we have such a stringent recruitment policy, they have to know the area, they have to have local knowledge. It’s imperative for the sort of radio we do,” said Jones. “We have to work with the available talent pool, rather than actually having a black and white job description.
In a very sparsely populated, rural area, you’ve got to go with what’s available in the market, rather than having a written job description where you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole.”
Jones added that local listeners would no longer have to put up with radio programmes being beamed across the country from Cardiff and Swansea.
The station won the newly awarded licence as the sole applicant, after The Wireless Group withdrew its bid for Carmarthenshire Sound in July.
TWG was forced to withdraw its bid for the licence because it already owns two other licences in overlapping catchment areas. TWG’s ownership of Swansea Sound, Swansea FM and AM licences, and Carmarthenshire Sound would have meant it exceeded the stated limit.
By Wale Azeez
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