PSM Contribution to Democracy: News, Editorial Standards and Informed Citizenship

Public service media beyond the digital hype: distribution strategies in a platform era

“…Some would argue that audience emancipation has long been an objective of public service broadcasting (Vanhaeght, 2019), although most would further agree that connecting with audiences is becoming increasingly difficult, not only for technical and economic reasons, but also because of the rise of populism in many countries. Populism rejects plurality of debate and political compromise, whereas public broadcasters have traditionally attempted to strengthen the concepts of citizenship and democracy as a whole (Cushion, 2019;Picard and Pickard, 2018: 16). Living up to that expectation will become ever more difficult in a PSM market where the last mile to the end-user is controlled by international conglomerates.…”

Journalism under (ideological) threat: Safeguarding and enhancing public service media into the 21st century

“…There are legitimate criticisms about their ability to remain independent of the state and in questioning institutional forms of power. However, there is also a large and growing body of scholarship that has empirically demonstrated public service media not only produce news of higher democratic value than their commercial rivals, but they are also more effective in raising people’s knowledge and understanding of politics and public affairs (Curran et al, 2009; Cushion, 2012, 2018; Cushion and Thomas, 2018).…”

A softer kind of hard news? Data journalism and the digital renewal of public service news in Sweden

“…Given that hard and soft news are hybridized in data journalism, this article points to a new direction in the study of public service organizations since previous research tends to see them as remedies to the softening of news discourse in market-driven news media organizations (Aalberg and Curran, 2012; Cushion, 2019; Esser et al, 2012). In a digital world, constructive dimensions of journalism might become increasingly important for how audiences perceive social conflicts and democratic issues (McIntyre, 2019), and it is important to remember that while data journalism obviously is not a hard news practice, neither is journalism in general.…”

“…The development of public service media has in this sense also been understood as a key dimension of the "media welfare state" that characterizes primarily the media systems of the Nordic countries (Syvertsen et al, 2014). Multiple international studies have shown that public service broadcasters have a greater proportion of hard news compared to commercial broadcasters (Aalberg and Curran, 2012;Cushion, 2019;Esser et al, 2012). This has also been the case in Sweden, although the differences have become less distinctive over time due to growing competition, digitalization, and a strengthened position of interpretative forms of journalism (Jönsson and Strömbäck, 2007;Waldahl et al, 2009).…”

“…Digital renewal has been increasingly central in the development of public service broadcasters as they strive to reach a new generation of distinctly digital news consumers (Shagrir and Keinonen, 2014; Van Dijck and Poell, 2015). An important contextual factor for this study is also that public service organizations, due to their specific remits, usually include a higher degree of hard news than commercial news organizations do (Aalberg and Curran, 2012; Cushion, 2019; Esser et al, 2012). However, to date, we do not know whether the strong position of hard news in public service news also applies to data journalism produced by such organizations.…”