This article addresses the ‘wicked’ problems met by contemporary public service media (PSM) institutions: to address the fragmentation of audiences across platforms; to have a positive impact on civil society and societal coherence; to facilitate cultural diversity; and to work with private creative industries and facilitate their growth. These objectives can be reduced to a conflict in producing both public and private value. In this article, we build on the combination of innovation systems theory and public value theory to investigate the interrelationships between the production of these different forms of value. Our case study is Estonia’s national pre-selection competition for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is innovative in terms of its cross-media framing and its approach to working with private partners to facilitate the development of the Estonian popular music system.

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Stemming from the concept of active audiences and from Henry Jenkins’ (2006) idea of participatory culture as the driving force behind the transformation of public service broadcasting into agencies of public service media (Bardoel, Ferrell Lowe 2007), this empirical study explores the attitude and behaviour of the audiences of two crossmedia projects, produced by the public service media of Finland (YLE) and Estonia (ERR). This empirical study aims to explore the behaviour, wants and needs of the audiences of cross-media productions and to shed some light on the conditions that support the dynamic switching of the engagement with cross-media. The study’s results suggest that audiences are neither passive nor active, but switch from one mode to another. The findings demonstrate that audience dynamism is circumstantial and cannot be assumed. Thus, thinking about active audiences and participation as the lymph of public service media becomes problematic, especially when broadcasters seek generalised production practices. This work demonstrates how television networks in general cannot be participatory, and instead, how cross-media can work as a vehicle of micro participation through small acts of audience engagement (Kleut et al. 2017).