Viral false information, siloed information habits, and growing distrust in the media are amongst today’s most alarming challenges to digital media markets. These phenomena impact trust in media at all societal levels – global, regional, national, and local. They are enabled by economic, sociocultural, and technological transformations that have destabilised media systems and involve commercial, governmental, and civic stakeholders. The consequences significantly impact the lives of ordinary citizens. In today’s context, the ability of public service media organisations to fulfill a mandated universalism mission and counter these trends requires a new approach that prioritises and operationalises collaborative efforts.

The seventh RIPE Reader investigates cross-boundary influences affecting public service media. PSM institutions remain domestically grounded and orientated, but must cope with international influences and the impact of globalisation. This presents significant environmental challenges keyed to policies that support networked communications which have important implications for the future of broadcasting. Meanwhile, internal institutional boundaries pose challenges to internal collaboration and synergy, and to achieving greater openness and cultivating public participation in PSM. Traditional boundaries between professional and non-professional production are often problematic, as well, for external collaboration. And there are enormous challenges in efforts to bridge boundaries between PSM and other public institutions (public sector), social movements (civil and volunteer sector) and companies (private sector). Cross-boundary phenomena offer tremendous opportunities for ensuring public service provision in the emerging media ecology, but managers and policy-makers must grapple with a range of dualities that require critical examination: public / private, national / international, broadcast / print, linear / non-linear, audience / user, production / distribution, citizen / consumer, and market / society. The scholarly contributions in this volume address issues that are relevant for improved understandings about Public Service Media Across Borders and Boundaries – a contemporary topic of keen theoretical and strategic importance.

The importance of reconceptualising what public service broadcasting [PSB] should be and do in the 21st century is a profile issue in media policy and strategic development planning. There is growing recognition that public participation is a necessary if problematic aspect of the transition to public service media [PSM]. This recognition correlates with a deepening understanding that the viability of the enterprise depends on the people paying for it and using its services. This fourth RIPE Reader demonstrates how the historic insularity of PSB companies is changing in efforts to restructure and revitalise the enterprise. The substance features further development of research presented in the RIPE@2008 conference in Germany, titled Public Service Media in the 21st Century: Participation, Partnership and Media Development. The authors included in this volume query what is required to achieve participation-readiness in many interdependent facets: strategy revision, organisational restructuring, retooling production processes, and redefining professional identities. Approached in two sections, the first focuses on theories and trends and the second on practices and performance. The contents document the significance of engaging the public in, with and through media services, arguing the crucial importance of the Public in Public Service Media.

The core challenge facing public service broadcasting today is the transition to public service media. This understanding characterised discourse among participants in the RIPE@2006 conference in the Netherlands, the theme of which was Public Service Broadcasting in the Multimedia Environment: Programmes and Platforms. The contributors in this volume focus attention on issues of strategic concern and tactical importance in addressing the core challenge. A defining theme is the need for moving beyond the transmission model of broadcasting to mature both professional and theoretical thinking necessary in public service communication. Audiences must be understood as partners rather than targets and content that is cross-media and cross-genre must be popular but remain distinctive. For policy makers the core challenge necessitates fairly balancing the often contrary interests of commerce and culture which is a fundamental tension in media policy today. The stakes are high because policy and operational decisions will establish the character of the European dual media system for decades to come. What is the mission of public service media in a multimedia environment characterised by globalization, convergence, digitization, and fragmentation? What is important for strategy development that renews the public service enterprise while keeping faith with the ethos that legitimates the endeavour? How might policy makers variously understand the fuller possibilities entailed in the development of a uniquely European dual media system? The authors address these questions to offer critical insights that deepen thinking about theoretical, strategic and operational aspects incumbent in the transition to PSM. The book has two sections. The first is focussed on dynamics, complications and challenges incumbent in policy development and strategy elaboration. The second focuses on content-related aspects with emphasis on strategic and tactical implications.

Will broadcasting survive convergence, and should it survive? If yes, why and in what form? The questions were fundamental to the RIPE@2002 conference in Finland and lay the groundwork for this book, representing the culmination of nearly two years of fruitful collaboration between media scholars and practitioners with a keen focus on the future of public service media. The contents help set the stage for the RIPE@2004 conference being organised in Denmark.The essential idea behind Re-visionary Interpretations of the Public Enterprice [RIPE] is a recognition that conceptual justification for public broadcasting no longer resonates. The authors in this volume explore various dimensions about what is different to any compelling degree about the public service approach that convincingly justifies its remit today, and about what contemporary ingredients could fruitfully reframe its conceptual and operational designs.This book is relevant to discource and policy about a quality of public life interdependent with social processes tha continue to respect and also defend values that nourish media pluralism, cultural divesity, political democracy and social tolerance. The book begins with the large-scale society and policy framework, moving next to the institutional framework and organizational practice, and concludes with consideration of reception and application. The authors also represent the Trans-Atlantic nature of the RIPE initiative. The publication is available in electronic version (pdf-format), the printed version is out of stock.  

In recent years public service broadcasting seems caught in a radicalized dilemma between two obligations. To serve and preserve national culture and identity has for decades been an essential mandated obligation. At the same time, being a ‘window to the world’ has also been central to the remit. How can PSB handle the challenges of being custodians of diluted national identities amid a variety of heterogeneous cultures on the one hand, and simultaneously acting as explorers of global orientation on the other? The ideal of serving an Enlightenment mission has always been central to the PSB role and function, to its legitimating remit. This mission is a defining strand in the DNA of public service broadcasting and it is still relevant today because many of the cultural issues it was originally instituted to partially address are recurrent and growing uncertainties in light of globalization. Integration and fragmentation is a fundamental contradiction of our day. Although the traditional Enlightenment mission is no longer operable, developing a newly enlightened cultural mission is essential for PSB legitimacy. Thus, cultural dilemmas in public service broadcasting framed the RIPE@2004 conference – Mission, Market and Management: Public Service Broadcasting and the Cultural Commons. The authors in this volume discuss the contemporary relevance of PSB as a culturally obligated and culturally oriented enterprise. They do this from many perspectives and focussed on various dimensions that, taken together, clarify why public service broadcasting is about much more than transmitting content. The issues treated herein speak fundamentally to how broadcasting ought to be socially harnessed, at least in fair measure, to beneficially serve a variety of contemporary cultural demands.

The worth of public service media is under increasing scrutiny in the 21st century as governments consider whether the institution is a good investment and a fair player in media markets. Mandated to provide universally accessible services and to cater for groups that are not commercially attractive, the institution often confronts conflicting demands. It must evidence its economic value, a concept defined by commercial logic, while delivering social value in fulfilling its largely not-for-profit public service mission and functions. Dual expectations create significant complexity for measuring PSM’s overall ‘public value’, a controversial policy concept that provided the theme for the RIPE@2012 conference, which took place in Sydney, This book, the sixth in the series of RIPE Readers on PSM published by NORDICOM, is the culmination of robust discourse during that event and the distillation of its scholarly outcomes. Chapters are based on top tier contributions that have been revised, expanded and subject to peer review (double-blind). The collection investi gates diverse conceptions of public service value in media, keyed to distinctions in the values and ideals that legitimate the public service enterprise in media in many countries.

Big countries and major markets are often proposed as models for TV broadcasting everywhere. This is evident in the development of European media policies and strategic renewal. It is taken for granted that such offer suitable and desirable models for smaller countries. This book questions that assumption on the basis of empirical research. Does a media market in a country with a few million people and far less GDP have the same opportunities as countries with many times the population or wealth? Does the same logic apply in all cases? The need for clarification is urgent given contemporary trends in ex ante regulation, and aggressive media lobbying that rests on an untested belief that one-size-fits-all. The research and analyses presented in this book confronts the presumption, concluding that in crucial respects one-size policies do not fit all countries anymore than one-size strategies fit all companies. There are important differences in size-related factors that establish limits in how TV broadcasting can be organised and operated. The book will reward close attention by policymakers and strategic managers alike, and makes a timely contribution to scholarship on the topic.

Public service media is today challenged on every front. Publics and politicians see the commercial approach as the ‘normal’ way to organise broadcasting. There are strong pressures to downsize PSM organisations, to limit investment options, to restrict online and digital operations, to narrow remits to genres and for audiences that are not commercially attractive, and for increasingly intrusive assessment procedures. The principles no longer resonate very widely and there is growing criticism about a decline in distinctiveness. Even among traditional allies, support is flagging and skepticism is growing. In Europe the institution has not yet presented a coherent and convincing strategy attuned for relevance in the 21st century. PSM has lost or is in danger of losing the initiative. At the same time, there are promising efforts to develop PSM in regions and countries lacking a domestic history with PSB – to gain the initiative for building PSM. This 5th RIPE Reader incorporates a wider purview as an outgrowth of proceedings from the RIPE@2010 conference that convened in London 8-11 September to address the theme, Public Service Media After the Recession. The book is divided into four sections, reflecting the varied and distinctive narratives of PSB around the world.

The eighth RIPE Reader critically examines the ‘networked society’ concept in relation to public service media. Although a popular construct in media policy, corporate strategy and academic discourse, the concept is vague and functions as a buzzword and catchphrase. This Reader clarifies and critiques the networked society notion with specific focus on enduring public interest values and performance in media. At issue is whether public service media will be a primary node for civil society services in the post-broadcasting era? Although networked communications offer significant benefits, they also present problems for universal access and service. An individual’s freedom to tap into, activate, build or link with a network is not guaranteed and threats to net neutrality are resurgent. Networks are vulnerable to hacking and geo-blocking, and facilitate clandestine surveillance. This Reader prioritises the public interest in a networked society. The authors examine the role of public media organisations in the robust but often contradictory framework of networked communications. Our departure point is both sceptical and aspirational, both analytical and normative, both forward-looking and historically-grounded. While by no means the last word on the issues treated, this collection provides a timely starting point at least.

Since the start of telephony and later in broadcasting, the pursuit of universal service has legitimated the ownership and operation of media as a public trust. Until the 1980s, this principle was the bedrock for the broadcasting mission and is still a mandated requirement for public media companies today. But in practice, the universalism ideal was largely abandoned in the 1980s as media deregulation promised more competition, innovation, and vigorous economic growth. Some of this came true, but at a worrisome cost. Growing distrust in media today is partly rooted in the illusion that more media in more platforms would inevitably ensure better media in all platforms. There is now more of everything on offer except social responsibility. This collection interrogates the historic universalism mission in public service broadcasting and explores its contemporary relevance for public service media. Taking a critical perspective on media policy and performance, the volume contributes to a much-needed contemporary reassessment that clarifies the importance of universalism for equity in access and provision, trustworthy content, and inclusive participation in the context of advancing digitalisation and globalisation. The collection situates universalism as an aspirational quest and inspirational pursuit. Researchers and policy makers will find the collection valuable for conceptualisation and strategic managers will find it helpful as a principled basis in the pursuit of improved reach and value.