Public Service Broadcasters' Strategies About Radio Apps

BOOK

The Listener of the Future: Exploring Public Service Broadcasters’ Strategies About Radio Apps

Marta Perrota | The Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio

2023


The article explores how public service radio stations switch to digital services and what principles they adopt in order to compete with apps like Spotify. These platforms have created dedicated applications, investing heavily in terms of content, metadata tactics, algorithms, and the fruition experience – fluid, agile, and personalised – on smartphones, in cars, and at home via smart speakers. Certainly, most European public service broadcasters, who are currently in the midst of a lengthy and complex digital transformation, have taken on this issue with zeal, but with what idea of the listener in mind? What specific ideas of the public role have been common in encouraging the adoption of effective digital competition solutions? What were the strategies in place to reinvent the content access experience? What sparked their interest? What types of audiences, if any, did they chose to deliberately target? This work aims to investigate the idea of the listener concept, which is at the heart of the vision of the future of radio condensed in a digital tool that allows listeners to play their part. If one of the primary goals of public service is universality, how can this notion be reconciled with the future development of radio apps?

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How Do Public Service Media Innovate?

JOURNAL

How Do Public Service Media Innovate? An Analysis of Product Development by European PSM

Annika Sehl & Alessio Cornia | Journalism Studies
2021


This paper examines how PSM innovate new products for digital news. To what extent does PSM rely on “institutional links or on tight coupling with the environment” during development of new products? Following interviews with public media workers, the findings conclude that when developing a new product, the public service mission, its audience and purpose are all taken into account. It finds that PSM also copy one another, as their structure and mandate are similar. But PSM does not simply copy other digital born media players who are already popular with younger audiences but rather PSM innovation is led with PSM values.

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Public Service Broadcasting in the Online TV Environment

JOURNAL

Public Service Broadcasting in the Online Television Environment: The Case for PSB VoD Players and the Role of Policy Focusing on the BBC iPlayer

Maria Michalis | International Journal of Communication
2022


In the era of online TV, this article assesses the main challenges faced by public service broadcasting (PSB). As of yet, the development of BBC iPlayer reveals that online TV has not fundamentally changed PSB, because of the interrelationship between VoD services and tv linear offerings. This article examines how PSB could be revived through personalisation and public service algorithms with the help of online TV.

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Public service media in the age of SVoDs

JOURNAL

Public service media in the age of SVoDs: A comparative study of PSM strategic responses in Flanders, Italy and the UK

Alessandro D’Arma, Tim Raats and Jeanette Steemers | Media, Culture & Society Journal
2021


This paper examines the response of public service media to the expansion of streaming services like Netflix and their disruption to established national television models around the world. This paper found that the response of PSM to the disruption caused by giant stream services is due to factors including the country’s governmental support for the role of PSM, and market size. It also found that PSM responds through different strategies one of which is production collaborations. 

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The Public Service Approach to Recommender Systems

JOURNAL

The Public Service Approach to Recommender Systems: Filtering to Cultivate

Jockum Holden | Television & New Media Journal
2022


The use of algorithms that recommend content to their users has dramatically transformed online media consumption. PSM is catching on and have adopted these algorithms into their own systems to personalise how their online content is distributed. However, since these algorithms cater to a more commercialised recommending system, it could make them incompatible with PSM values, which is to disseminate diverse content. This study gives an in-depth knowledge of how PSM have modified these recommender systems to suit a non-commercial setting. 

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What are the ethical concerns behind 'recommendations'?

REPORT

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.

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Mutual Aid and the “Messy Middle”: pushing public radio toward antiracism

REPORT

Mutual Aid and the “Messy Middle”

Pushing public radio toward antiracism

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism | Andrea Wenzel

Published: 2021

Across the U.S., a number of public media stations have been undertaking initiatives with the aim of making their newsrooms and their journalism more inclusive of Black, Indigenous, and people of color and other marginalized communities. These initiatives have taken a variety of forms, including tracking the diversity of their sources; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops and trainings; and community engagement initiatives.

[Text sourced from the Tow Center]

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Organisational culture

Organisational Culture of Public Service Media: People, values, processes

REPORT

Organisational Culture of Public Service Media: People, values, processes

Dr Michał Głowacki and Professor Lizzie Jackson
2019

Organisational culture
Credit: Dr Michał Głowacki and Professor Lizzie Jackson
In 2015-2019 Dr Michał Głowacki and Professor Lizzie Jackson investigated the internal organisational cultures of ten successful high technology clusters in North America and Europe to identify strategies to support the evolution of Public Service Media worldwide. 

Four media clusters were located in North America: Austin (Texas), Boston/Cambridge (Massachusetts), Detroit (Michigan) and Toronto (Canada). European clusters included London (UK), Warsaw (Poland), Copenhagen (Denmark), Brussels (Belgium), Tallinn (Estonia), and Vienna (Austria). To answer the question ‘what people, values and processes’ should Public Service Media embody going forward we found there is an urgent need for adaptation. Without internal change there is likely to be a decline in the ability of PSM to survive within the fast-evolving contemporary media and communications production and distribution landscape.

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Media Influence Matrix

REPORT

Media Influence Matrix Project

Central European University’s Centre for Media, Data and Society (CEU-CMDS) 

About

Launched in 2017, the CMDS project maps and assesses “the state of journalism on a country-by-country basis”. Country reports include articles, analytical papers and data sets that aim to answer questions on regulation, funding and technology.

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The Next Newsroom

REPORT

The Next Newsroom

Unlocking the power of AI for public service journalism

Atte Jääskeläinen and Maike Olij, EBU

Abstract

The report sorts out real strategic opportunities from hype, and gives 30 concrete examples of successful projects and toolboxes and recommendations for news organisations. Login is required.

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