Paddy French, the Rebecca editor, was born in Northern Ireland, moving to Wales when he was seven. He started work as a trainee reporter on the Abergavenny Chronicle in 1967, but in 1971 he came to Cardiff for the one year diploma in journalism course, a hotbed of reporters disillusioned with the mainstream press. In 1973 he launched Rebecca, part of a wave of alternative newspapers in Britain. Rebecca introduced investigative journalism to Wales and its uncompromising Corruption Supplement became the leading source of information about the emerging corruption scandal in local government with some 14 councillors and business named in the Supplement later going to prison. Rebecca folded in 1982 and French left journalism for nearly two decades. In the early 1990s he set up Rebecca Television as an independent television company, producing programmes for Channel 4's Dispatches as well as for the BBC and ITV in Wales. He joined ITV Wales' Wales This Week in 1998 and spent ten years with the strand before retiring in 2008.

‘If people value investigative journalism, they will have to pay for it’

The Rebecca website went live in April, nearly four decades after the original magazine hit the streets of Wales. The site revives its forebear’s reputation for tough investigative journalism, but enters a radically different media landscape. So can it charge?