Public service broadcasters across Europe are venturing into the digital world, launching niche TV channels, building extensive websites, developing commercial services, entering into partnerships with external actors, and exploring new ways to reach users, whether its through smart phone apps or screens in public spaces. Such endeavours intensify fundamental discussions about what we need public service media institutions for. These are complex discussions, building on history, encompassing new technology, and involving a range of strong stakeholders. Recently, the so-called public value test has emerged as the focal point for these discussions. As a detailed regulatory scheme to measure the public worth and possible market impact of planned publicly funded media services, the public value test is causing controversy across Europe. This collection of short essays from academics, regulators, public broadcasters and private media representatives, provides thought-provoking perspectives on the state of play of public value tests in a range of European states. In so doing, the book is a topical intervention in the ongoing debate about the future of our media systems.

Until recently, media policy was thought of as national, media-specific, and as part of the cultural domain. All is changing in a digital public sphere: first, by the processes of globalization in a broad sense; second, by a blurring of borders between media, which can be summed up as convergence; and third, by a more far-reaching commercialisation of the media. The transformation triggered by these developments are ongoing and have been so for quite a few years. Thus, it is time to take stock. The different contributions in this book set out to do that. With basis in the idea that media policy is fundamentally about regulating the public sphere in accordance with central democratic ideals, the book covers a wide range of issues: Transnational online television distribution; the trouble with building and opening digital audiovisual archives; the impact of recent EU regulations on global conglomerates as well as national public service broadcasters; the debate on net neutrality; the idea of the participating public in policy-making; the regulation of freedom of speech on the internet; as well as the impact of legal globalization on media policy itself.

This chapter discusses inequality from the perspective of media use. It analyses patterns of news consumption and willingness to pay for news in three comparatively well-off countries – the small Nordic welfare states of Finland, Denmark and Norway. The chapter reveals significant dissimilarities between these case countries, which we need to understand in relation to the countries’ wider media systems as well as historically. By zooming in on news consumption in Denmark, Finland and Norway, we also gain a better understanding of how subtle inequalities play out within these societies. News that is free to users matters as a resource for the citizenship of specific social groups. The implication is that regulatory schemes need to be developed that facilitate quality news provision through channels that are free at the point of use.

This chapter revisits the concept of the media welfare state, a term we coined a decade ago (with fourth author Ole Mjøs). The concept highlighted how welfare state principles influenced media policy in the Nordic countries and how policymakers used regulatory measures to correct negative implications of state and market governance. In this chapter, we consider how policymakers responded to a trend we did not previously discuss: the media’s contribution to overconsumption and environmental damage. Based on an empirical discussion of three phases of Norwegian media policy – early television, early broadband, and early data centre policies – we argue that in facing these challenges, politicians have been less willing to use policy measures to reduce harmful consequences. Instead, there is a tendency towards unquestionably labelling media and digital platforms “a green industry”.

This book is about teletext: a “broadcast service using several otherwise unused scanning lines (vertical blanking intervals) between frames of TV pictures to transmit information from a central data base to receiving television sets”. To the contributors to this book and possibly to many readers, this technical definition will feel out of place as it obscures the rich history of a formidable if forgotten medium. Nevertheless, it is the basic technology of teletext that sets it apart from other media and that, in part, has been the basis for much of what did and did not happen to teletext in terms of policy, institutional setting, content, users and scholarly interest. Many contributions in this book will provide similar definitions, but mostly as a stepping-stone to explore all that has so far been left unsaid by this technical description. It is this gap in our knowledge of teletext in Europe that this book aims to fill.

This chapter analyses how citizens in four Nordic countries navigated the complex information environment during the Covid-19 pandemic, where news from various sources mixed with abundant information across digital platforms. In response to concerns about false and misleading information in a public health crisis, we ask to which degree Nordic citizens worried about being misinformed regarding Covid-19, and how they evaluated the trustworthiness of pandemic news. In the context of a global crisis affecting everyday life, we ask how people relied on local news for information specifically relevant to their situation. To answer our research questions, we draw on comparative survey data from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, combined with qualitative in-depth interviews on pandemic news experiences in Norway. Our analysis contributes with a contextualised understanding of pandemic news use in the Nordics, emphasising the relevance of societal structures of high trust and extensive news provision.