Host institution: Paris Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS) 🇦🇹
Supervisors: Prof. Josef Trappel (PLUS) and Prof. Natascha Just (UZH)
Academic secondment: University of Zurich (UZH) 🇨🇭
Industrial secondment: Ofcom 🇬🇧
PhD duration: 3 years
The PhD project is titled: Regulating Public Interest Media in a platform world.
This PhD position contributes to the wide body of literature on the regulation of Public Service Media (PSM). Almost all member states rely on the services of Public Service Media to inform, educate and entertain their population. This formula, from the early days of BBC, requires translation into today’s highly segmented platform world. Theoretically, this project establishes a contemporary understanding of the concept of public interest, delivered by a media organisation established by law.
Public Interest Media (PIM) — generally speaking, private non-profit and public service organisations — are central to democratic communication. They provide citizens with trustworthy information, cultural diversity, and opportunities for participation, while facing increasing pressures from technological transformation, market competition, and changing societal expectations. Benefiting from comparatively high levels of public trust, these media possess a unique capacity to influence public attitudes and behaviours. Future Public Interest Media organisations find themselves in a highly competitive market environment, thus requiring the organisation to find a way to co-exist with private media and (global) platforms. This requires a sound regulatory setting in which the value-based Public Interest Media concept can be sustained and developed further.
Based on this understanding, a number of challenges need to be identified. These include competition issues with global conglomerates and corporations also competing at the national level, resulting in a loss of sovereignty of national Public Interest Media organisations. Second, output adaptations are required in order to respond to changing usage patterns by the audience. In particular, personalised services, in addition to mass media appeal content, need to be developed and distributed. Third, digital interfaces on receiving devices require new strategies of findability and discoverability. Particular measures are necessary to maintain the due prominence status for Public Interest Media services.
While the primary responsibility for implementing these measures lies with Public Interest Media management, the focus of this project is on the role of regulation in addressing these challenges and ensuring a level playing field for all stakeholders. In particular, regulation may serve to protect the public interest, facilitate a swift and reliable transition towards personalised services provided by Public Interest Media, and prevent practices by platform-based competitors that are detrimental to the public interest. Moreover, regulation is intended to facilitate the transition from mass media Public Interest Media applications to personalised services without compromising viewer retention.
Personalisation of service constitutes, in this respect, a novel policy challenge on how to audit and regulate personalised content exposure. By comparing how Public Interest Media are located in the digital marketplace and how national legal structures correspond with the digital global requirements, (legal) remit adjustments are suggested to make Public Interest Media future-proof in times of more and global competition. Generally speaking, regulation needs to provide a suitable framework to allow public and private companies to exploit digital opportunities to their specific ends: profit generation on the one hand and servicing the public interest, on the other.
The project’s empirical and methodological approach involves desk research on Public Service Media literature, with a comparative perspective on identifying best practice examples in EU member states and other countries, such as Canada, Australia, and Japan. The project will build on a sound theoretical model of Public Interest Media. It will apply qualitative methods and interviews with regulators and management staff of public service institutions.
The anticipated outcomes encompass the establishment of a regulatory framework for personalised services, in conjunction with the fulfilment of conventional responsibilities. The development of guidelines is imperative to facilitate the capacity of Public Interest Media operators to compete with platform-based operators on personalised media interfaces, in response to the gradual shift in viewing behaviour from linear to on-demand.