Ifan Morgan Jones set up the news site in 2017 with just over £5,300 in crowdfunding and no corporate backing. The idea was to create a community-driven news organisation, responsive to local concerns.
So long as Nation.Cymru could target Reform UK and the Labour establishment in Cardiff, there was no conflict between its progressive politics and proud Welsh nationalism.
Now that Wales has its first-ever Plaid Cymru government, however, Nation.Cymru will find it harder to strike a balance between them.
It’s a lot easier to report on the failures of parties with faraway leadership, as Nation.Cymru has been doing for nearly a decade, than to find fault with one that is close to home. But the news site will have to adapt if it wants to retain its adversarial strength.
Jones was inspired to create Nation.Cymru because English-language media in Wales was largely regional and local, even though English is the dominant language there. Why should only the Welsh-language media be national?
It’s no accident that Jones was an editor at Golwg360, a Welsh-speaking news site. His experience there raised concerns that the Welsh-language press largely catered to a Welsh-speaking middle-class constituency.
Nation.Cymru has made a big splash with its political reporting by covering stories in Cardiff Bay that the big UK papers miss. But it isn’t just a political news site. It aims to reach a broad audience by covering rugby as seriously as the Senedd.
The platform now attracts around two million readers a month. This is remarkable reach for a not-for-profit media outlet that started with crowdfunding and still relies upon it, along with public grants and subscriptions.
Too many Westminster journalists still view Wales as a “backwater” rather than a constituent nation with a rich cultural hinterland, a civil society, and democratic institutions worth reporting on. Many SW1 lobby journalists don’t give a toss what’s happening at the Senedd.
Indeed, the realignment of Welsh politics in the May elections has barely been discussed in London media, even though Labour suffered a massive defeat and Plaid Cymru more than tripled its numbers in the legislature.
The myopia of the mainstream UK media, where only the rat race of Westminster counts, is why Nation.Cymru exists.
The Good Fight
Nation.Cymru is well positioned—unusually so for an alternative platform—to cover the Plaid Cymru government since it’s spent nine years building its reporting capacity.
Figuring out how to cover it politically will be a challenge, though, because two forms of nationalism are competing for power.
One encouraging sign is that Nation.Cymru broke the news in 2023 that Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price was resigning over claims the party had failed to address sexual harassment claims.
This resulted from the same hard-nosed reporting that helped bring down Labour First Minister Vaughan Gething after Nation.Cymru reported that he had accepted a £200,000 donation from a businessman convicted of dumping waste in a conservation area. The same man had received a £400,000 loan from the Development Bank of Wales.
Gething’s downfall didn’t stop right-wing critics from sneering that the media is just another left-wing platform in lockstep with Welsh Labour.
Although it’s true that Nation.Cymru fits into a progressive centre-left media culture, its reporting can reach beyond the limits of this culture. This has drawn some animosity from the Welsh right.
The Welsh right, heavily invested in Britain and the English language, would like to roll back devolution, all other “wokery” and close the borders to all foreigners. Reform UK is the vehicle for such demands in Cardiff Bay.
In late 2025, Nation.Cymru clashed with Reform UK over its coverage of MS Laura Anne Jones using a slur for Chinese people in WhatsApp messages. Jones was suspended for 14 days over the message. She’s now deputy leader since Dan Thomas resigned.
Reform UK came after Nation.Cymru over naming one of the message’s recipients. The National Union of Journalists condemned the legal threats as “bullying” at the time.
Chief executive Mark Mansfield described the legal threats as “Trumpian” in an interview with The Guardian. He suggested that this gave a “flavour” of how a Farage government would handle the media.
“It seems free speech only exists for people who agree with them,” Mansfield said.
Reform UK briefed the press that Nation.Cymru was just a “far-left Welsh nationalist blog”. Yet this is the same “blog” that brought down a Labour first minister.
Tensions with the populist right haven’t gone away. When Welsh Reform leader Dan Thomas resigned on 15 September, Nation.Cymru reported that the national party was trying to “cover up” the story behind the resignation.
Thomas stepped down after being arrested on suspicion of assault and engaging in coercive, controlling behaviour. Reform UK quickly rallied the troops and installed Helen Jenner as acting leader.
Reform UK invoked Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, guaranteeing the right to respect for privacy and family life, in briefings to the Welsh media.
Nation.Cymru was one of a few outlets to grasp that the Eurosceptic party was actually invoking the European convention to ward off reporting on claims of domestic violence.
At the same time, Reform politician Sarah Cooper-Lesadd defected to Plaid Cymru, claiming that the right-wing party has “no interest” in Wales. Nation.Cymru was uniquely positioned to connect the dots between these events.
In reporting on defection, Nation.Cymru focused on the wave of misogynist abuse directed her way after switching parties.
So much of journalism is a mixture of courtier reporting and hagiography. But the best journalists often make powerful enemies.
The New Challenge
The failure of Westminster to meet the needs of people living in Wales is the primary reason for the rise of Welsh nationalism. Labour and the Tories failed Wales, so now Plaid Cymru and Reform UK have taken over the political arena.
It’s odd that it took this long. Unlike the push for Scottish independence, Welsh nationalism didn’t win much separatist support at home for a long time.
Welsh Labour managed to claim the vestiges of progressive patriotism for itself.
First Minister Mark Drakeford would always appear flanked by the Welsh flag. Yet such gestural politics weren’t enough in the end.
Unlike Scottish Labour, Welsh Labour survived the Blair project by pivoting to centre-left cultural nationalism. This cultural project eventually came apart after years of austerity and bad policymaking.
The Starmer government was the last straw for Welsh Labour voters, with its open contempt for most ordinary people expressed through its total dishonesty.
It’s doubtful that Andy Burnham will be able to repair the damage.
Nation.Cymru has played a great role in critically taking apart Welsh Labour’s record. Now it’s time for Plaid Cymru to face the same level of scrutiny as the ruling party, just as the right-wing opposition must be held to account.
Almost a decade after it was founded, Plaid Cymru is well placed for the new era of Welsh politics, where competing forms of nationalism—civic versus ethnic—have supplanted the traditional Labour-Tory divide.
We’re about to find out how much Nation.Cymru values its own independence as a news organisation at a time when the prospect of Welsh independence no longer seems so fanciful.
Photograph courtesy of Plaid Cymru. Published under a Creative Commons license.
