Two rapidly growing media clusters - Clwstwr in Cardiff and Media City in Bergen - will today launch a partnership to connect the two clusters.

Clwstwr and Media City Bergen will collaborate on a range of joint activities to connect creatives and media businesses in both regions to share skills, expertise and knowledge.

The clusters connected due to their common, and complementary, strengths after first meeting in Cardiff in 2019. The Norwegian Media Cluster is a world ­leader in ­augmented ­reality, graphics, AI, virtual studios, broadcast & IP based video, robotics and tools for workflow and visual storytelling. The South Wales media cluster is based on the significant presence in the region of UK broadcasters, major studios, and a strong independent production sector exporting high value content to global markets.

Professor Justin Lewis, Director of Clwstwr, said: “We are delighted to be working with the Media City Bergen, and we are excited about the opportunities to learn from one another. We have common areas of interest – such as news and using media to enhance democracy – as well as complementary areas of expertise, so we see great potential for collaborations between Norwegian and Welsh companies as we work together.”

Anne Jacobsen, CEO, Media City Bergen said: “We are looking forward to a close collaboration with Clwstwr. Ever since we visited Cardiff, we have wanted to set up a structured and long-lasting partnership, as we see that there are many synergies and common fields of interest between the two innovation clusters. We look forward to working together on both the challenges and opportunities in the media industry and are grateful for the opportunity to learn from our Welsh sister-cluster.”

Media City Bergen work to empower important stories, ensure an informed population, and strengthen democracy. They aim to preserve democracy by driving the development of technology for utilizing user information, improving digital storytelling and digital journalism, and deploying artificial intelligence in the fight against misinformation and fake news.

Clwstwr has responded to the dramatic decline in under 35’s engagement with reliable journalism and the resulting informational mix that combines credible and unreliable sources by funding ideas that develop new informational genres with a focus on data and new technologies or platforms that enhance the business model for public interest news.

On 16 March 2021, Clwstwr and Media City Bergen held a joint online event to launch the partnership.

The following speakers were at the event: 

  • Shirish Kulkarni of Monnow Media who has been investigating, creating and testing new and imaginative storytelling techniques with Clwstwr since 2019, resulting in the Seven Building Blocks of Reflective Journalism.
  • Yvonne Murphy of OmiDaze Productions presented from Wales. Her year-long politically neutral and non-party political Clwstwr research and development project, The Democracy Box: New Ways to create democratic participation, aims to produce the prototype of an approach to civic engagement which can be developed and replicated across the UK.
  • From Bergen, we heard from Maria Amelie, co-founder of Factiverse. Factiverse automates the detection of misinformation with cutting-edge AI and NLP. Their patented solution helps journalists and editors to fact-check news and automatically identify fact-check worthy claims, saving time and resources and preventing further spread of misinformation. Factiverse's technology is based on founder Vinay Setty's research from the University of Stavanger, Norway, where he is an Associate Professor in Machine Learning. 
  • We also learnt more about Web64 from founder Olav Hjertåker. Web64 aims to use data to better understand the world. By monitoring what content is published, who is sharing it, and where it is being shared we can provide tools for media companies, political parties, government organizations, and researchers where they gain insights into how the media landscape is changing and what is causing these changes.