Welsh Government funding
Money from government, straight to Welsh newsrooms.
Ping News administers public funding for journalism in Wales. Three separate schemes, every penny of it going to independent publishers for the work they do.
The Accelerator
The Accelerator supports community news organisations committed to delivering locally relevant public interest news, and to growing the independent community news sector in Wales.
The money comes from the Welsh Government. It originates in the Co-operation Agreement between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru, which carries a commitment to fund journalism in Wales in order to tackle the information deficit: the gap left in communities where nobody is reporting on the council, the courts or the planning decisions.
Ping News administers it. We run the application process, assess against the criteria, distribute the grants and report on what the money did.
What publishers get
In the first round, grants of up to £9,400 were awarded to ten organisations from a £100,000 fund. The fund was inundated with applications from across Wales and only ten grants could be awarded.
A top-up round followed in 2024, with grants of up to £7,000. The most recent round, in 2025, awarded up to £9,250 to ten publishers. Three rounds, thirty grants, £256,087 to eleven publishers.
The grants pay publishers for their time, which is the thing local journalism is always short of. Not equipment, not software, not a platform subscription. The hours it takes to sit through a planning meeting and write it up.
What it has done
The fund has let outlets expand editorial capacity, improve the quality of what they publish, and engage more deeply with the communities they serve. It has supported coverage of underreported issues and created job opportunities in newsrooms that were running on goodwill.
Across Wales that has meant more transparent local governance, richer community engagement and better representation for audiences who were being served by nobody.
The fund that came first
Before the Accelerator there was the Welsh Public Interest Journalism Fund, which ran in 2022 under the same Co-operation Agreement commitment. It paid £91,351 across sixteen awards to eight publishers: a main round, a smaller second pot, a top-up, and an emergency fund for titles hitting a sudden problem.
The Senedd Reporter
Separate from the grants, and a different kind of thing. The Welsh Government funds a dedicated Senedd reporter, modelled on the BBC’s local democracy scheme, so that what happens in the Senedd is reported for communities that would otherwise never see it covered.
It has run for three years, £135,000 in total: £36,000 from May 2023, then £49,500 in each of December 2024 and December 2025. The post is held at Caerphilly Observer, and the reporting is shared.
We administer it rather than fund it, and it is counted separately here because it pays for one journalist’s post rather than being shared across the sector.
Why this sits on this site
Because it is the clearest working example of what we say we do. Money that an individual publisher in Wales was never going to secure alone, secured and distributed through an organisation acting on their behalf, with the publishers keeping everything that makes them what they are.
It is also the part of our work that is easiest to verify. The grantees are named, the funder is a government, and the reporting is public.
Read more
The rounds, written up as they happened.
We have published on each year of the Accelerator, including who received grants and what the money was spent on.