How Business Can Support a Healthy Infosphere
Investing in Facts: How the Business Community Can Support a Healthy Infosphere
Marius Dragomir | CIMA
2023
The report emphasises the relationship between the private sector and independent media and why the private sector should care about independent media. It studies three countries’ – Czechia, Romania, and Serbia – media and business sectors, and examines how efforts have been made to counter disinformation and boost independent media. The business community in all these three regions has different reasons for supporting independent media but all of them have realised that a healthy business environment can only thrive if the community is well informed. In addition, the report highlights limitations experienced by the business sector, lack of financial resources, and absence of communication between independent journalism and the private sector.
Integrating Ethnic Content into Public Service Broadcasting
Integrating Ethnic Content into Public Service Broadcasting
Centre for Law and Democracy
2023
When working towards a democracy, it is important that ethnic content can be integrated into public service broadcasting (PSB). This Note looks at how this can be achieved. In democracies, the overall regulatory system for broadcasting has tools and mechanisms to help aid and encourage broadcasting material and content that is a rough representation of the population. Broadcasters also take measures to ensure they serve the needs and interests of all members in society. This Note looks at ways to promote ethnic voices in PSB.
What is life like without the BBC?
Deprivation Study: What is life like without the BBC?
MTM
2022
The Deprivation Study set out to uncover the value of BBC to its audience. The study took away all BBC services from 80 households from 16 different locations. Before the study, 30 households neither wanted to pay or receive BBC services, 30 households wanted to pay less of the BBC TV licence, and the last 20 households were happy to pay full licence or more. After nine days without the BBC, results of this study found that 42 of the 60 ‘pay nothing’ and ‘pay less’ households changed their minds and became willing to pay the full licence fee or more. Another 4 households from the ‘pay nothing’ households also changed their stance to at least be willing to the licence but pay less of it. The results reveal that people underestimated the value of the BBC and found that they were elements unique to BBC that led them to feel the licence was worth it. “When households are without the BBC and assess its role and what they missed, the majority re-evaluated the value of the licence fee and what the BBC brings.”
Between the Fourth Estate and the Fifth Power
Public Service Media in Europe: Between the Fourth Estate and the Fifth Power
ORF Public Value Texts
2022
ORF is required by law to provide comprehensive quality control. In addition to the Public Value Report and the Annual Report, this consists primarily of elements created with the help of scientific expertise: The “Audience Panels”, during which the audience‘s opinion on various program pillars is explored, are evaluated by a social science institute. The representative survey on program appreciation, among other things, is conducted by social scientists, as is the testing of the quality profiles – the self-commitments of ORF editors to various program genres. And ORF‘s annual public value study, which has been published for years in cooperation with other European public broadcasters, is entrusted to outstanding experts, especially from the field of communications science. Not only the ORF-programmes with their public mission and remit to inform and educate on TV, radio, and online, but also ORF quality control is thus closely linked to scientific knowledge.
Consequently we reacted positively to the request of RIPE founder Greg Lowe and the University of Vienna to hold a separate ORF Day in Vienna for RIPE, the most important scientific conference on public service media. This first day of the conference focuses on the exchange between journalism and science on the conference topic “Between the Fourth Estate and the Fifth Power”. In addition, this issue of PUBLIC VALUE TEXTE publishes the extended abstracts of the scholars invited to the conference. We
would like to thank Michael-Bernhard Zita and Regina Außerwöger from the University of Vienna for organizing the conference and all the authors for writing the abstracts.
[Text sourced from ORF]
What are the ethical concerns behind 'recommendations'?
What are the ethics behind ‘recommendations’?
Elliot Jones | Ada Lovelace Institute
2022
As public service media organisations now match other media platforms and content providers in offering personalised recommendations on their apps and websites, what are the ethical concerns they need to consider when building these systems? This report from the Ada Lovelace Institute examines this question. The objectives of public service media are completely different to those of private entities – where the latter use personalisation as a tool of increasing engagement and monetisation, the former must use it to serve their principles of openness, accountability, and public service. They also need to be more transparent in how the recommendation systems themselves work.
Public service: A Swedish overview of knowledge (Swedish)
Public service: A Swedish overview of knowledge
Nordicom
Published: June 2022
“The purpose of Public service: A Swedish overview of knowledge is to present in an easily accessible way what empirical research has come to in key issues concerning public service. The chapter authors are active at Swedish universities and colleges, and most of the results and conclusions presented are based on reviews of previously published research. In all chapters, the focus is on public service news journalism.
Public service: A Swedish overview of knowledge is aimed at anyone with an interest in public service – not least politicians, journalists and public debaters.”
[Text sourced from Nordicom]
Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries
Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries
The International Journal of Press/Politics | Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard
Published: 2021
Neff and Pickard’s new report provides further evidence that where public media is better funded, with secure funding and regulatory frameworks, they are “consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies”, and that citizens are more likely to engage in democratic processes. The study is based on a framework by Hallin and Mancini of North American and European media systems, and in correlation with the rankings of the 33 countries in the top two tiers of The 2019 Democracy Index (“full” and “flawed” democracies), developed by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU).
The Contribution of NRK to Norwegian Media Diversity
The Contribution of NRK to Norwegian Media Diversity
A review from The Norwegian Media Authority to the Ministry of Culture
Medietilsynet
Published: November 2021
“In a report published on 29 November 2021, the Norwegian Media Authority (NMA) concludes that the public service media provider NRK contributes positively to media diversity and to the overall offer to the public by fulfilling its public service broadcasting remit and by working with other actors in the Norwegian media market. A detailed summary of the report is now available in English.
The objective of the report, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, was to identify how NRK contributes to diversity of content and exposure, whether it fulfils its duty to cover thematic and geographic blind spots and how the competitive effects of its activities impact on the media market. on online news and current affairs.
The review is based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data and studies from a wide range of sources including NRK, public authorities, consultants and academic researchers and takes into consideration input from the media industry.”
[Text sourced from the European platform of regulatory authorities]
Changing Newsrooms 2021
Changing Newsrooms 2021
Hybrid Working and Improving Diversity Remain Twin Challenges for Publishers
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University | Federica Cherubini, Nic Newman, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Published: 2021
The return to the office is underway but with COVID-19 lingering in a number of countries, progress remains uneven and uncertain. Many will find newsrooms very different places to the ones they left. For some, the office has disappeared completely.
This report, which is based on a survey of 132 senior industry leaders from 42 countries as well as a series of in-depth interviews, makes clear that ‘hybrid working’ will soon be the norm for the vast majority of journalists in many news organisations – with some people in the office and others working remotely – and that the industry is still struggling with attracting talent and addressing lack of diversity.
[Text sourced from the RISJ]
British Public Service Broadcasting, the EU and Brexit
British Public Service Broadcasting, the EU and Brexit
Department of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK | Mike Berry, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Inaki Garcia-Blanco, Lucy Bennett and Joe Cable
Published: 2021
This paper analyses the historic role of Britain’s major public service broadcaster, the BBC, in reporting the European Union. To do this it combines a content analysis of two datasets of BBC broadcast and online coverage from 2007 and 2012 with a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with former and current senior BBC editors and journalists. The research finds that BBC coverage in the pre-referendum period was closely tied to major events – such as summits – and elite party conflict. These patterns in coverage were primarily a consequence of the lack of traditional news values inherent in most EU stories and the impact of the wider political and media landscape. The consequence of these patterns in coverage was to present audiences with a restricted, negative and largely conflictual picture of Britain’s relationship with the EU which is likely to have fuelled rather than inhibited the growth of Euroscepticism.
[Text sourced from the Taylor and France Online]