Host institution: Vrije universiteit Brussel (VUB) 🇧🇪
Supervisors: Prof. Tim Raats (VUB) and Prof. Ulrike Rohn (TLU)
Academic secondment: Tallinn University (TLU) 🇪🇪
Industrial secondment: Nordvision, Oslo 🇳🇴
PhD duration: 4 years
The PhD project is titled: Global logics in local contexts: Reinventing partnership strategies for Public Interest Media.
As part of their digital transformation, Public Interest Media organisations are increasingly evolving into content platforms. Yet their mandate and operations remain largely oriented toward domestic audiences, which limits their potential scale. To sustain and expand their activities, many have explored partnerships with global streamers and video-sharing services. However, this reliance on major third-party platforms introduces new dependencies in content dissemination and raises challenges related to data management and protection, editorial autonomy, and the preservation of cultural distinctiveness.
This project develops and evaluates scalable models for content dissemination that balance the use of global platforms, Public Interest Media’s own channels, and collaboration between public media organisations.
Areas of research for the PhD project include, but are not limited to:
- Key organisational transformations and challenges for Public Interest Media
- (Existing) cross-border and cross-domain partnership strategies, and (recommendations for) successful collaboration practices
- Existing practices and potential models for collaboration strategies within and across media ecosystems, both with public and private third-parties
- Future scenarios based on research findings
- Recommendations and best practices for meaningful collaborations in the public interest.
The project explores and assesses collaborations and interdependences between Public Interest Media and third parties in relation to global platforms and to other public interest organisations, while striving for an ‘Information’ or ‘Digital Commons’. Methods can include the following:
- Extensive desk research and empirical mapping
- Fieldwork consisting of expert interviews, complemented by ethnography and/or on-site participatory observations at public media institutions
- Semi-automated data collection and automated data and textual analysis
- Comparative case study analyses
- Scenario-building.