Host institution: Charles University (CU) 🇨🇿
Supervisors: Prof. Petr Szczepanik (CU) and Prof. Wendy Van den Broeck (VUB)
Academic secondment: Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) 🇧🇪
Industrial secondment: Česká Televize (ČT) 🇨🇿
PhD duration: 4 years
The PhD project is titled: Reinventing content for online-first public media.
This doctoral project investigates how Public Service Media (PSM) reinvent scripted and non-scripted formats for online-first environments — and what that means for universality, diversity, and audience reach. Building on RePIM’s ecosystem view of a platformised, data-driven media landscape, the project asks how online-only/online-first content production and curation can act as a vehicle for creative and organisational innovation in Public Service Media while remaining anchored in public values (e.g., pluralism, inclusivity, accessibility). It will analyse how commissioning, development, and publishing practices adapt to social-media logics and how these shifts affect the social impact of public interest content.
Key questions:
- How do online-first drama units operationalise audience insight, data, and platform imaginaries from idea through release, and with what public value outcomes?
- When Public Service Media ‘go small’ (short-form, low-budget, multifunctional teams), what new workflows and risks emerge — and how do these models help ‘youthify’ public media while preserving universality?
- What risks and opportunities arise when Public Service Media distribute and promote online-first content via commercial platforms (e.g., algorithmic gatekeeping, data lock-in, editorial independence, brand dilution vs. reach and discovery)? Which publishing, metadata, and governance strategies best safeguard public values while leveraging those platforms’ scale?
- How should PSM design and evaluate online curation and recommendation to balance personalisation with universality and diversity, ensure transparency, and avoid reproducing commercial biases?
Context and significance: European cases show online-first youth drama as a testbed for innovation — using real-time publishing, transmedia storytelling, and deep audience research to reconnect with ‘missing’ youth audiences. This has driven organisational change and platformisation within Public Service Media, but also raised tensions around resources, skills, and the limits of small, always-on teams. The project situates these dynamics within RePIM’s wider transformation agenda (content, organisation, infrastructures, audiences, governance).
Methodology: A mixed qualitative design anchored in production studies:
- Ethnography of production cultures in online divisions (room-to-release observation, workflow mapping) and cultural differences with more traditional Public Service Media units.
- Elite interviews with commissioners, showrunners, data/audience teams, and portal leads.
- Document and artefact analysis (production bibles, decks, analytics dashboards, platform policies).
- Lightweight audience-insight triangulation (cross-platform metrics, complemented by qualitative audience work) to evaluate universality/diversity effects in distribution and discovery — mindful of Public Service Media’s data-ethics constraints.
- Comparative case studies may include Nordic exemplars and East-Central European online-first initiatives to capture path-dependent strategies and institutional resistance/adaptation.