Search

This article analyses the response of European Public Service Media to the crisis caused by Covid-19, especially the impact of the pandemic on Europe's major public broadcasters, with a particular focus on technical and professional constraints, alterations in audience volume and habits, production strategies, type of broadcast content and journalists' routines. The research is based on public information from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and 19 in-depth, structured interviews with a convenience sample of innovation and strategy managers from public broadcasters in Austria (ORF), Belgium (VRT and RTBF), Denmark (DR), Finland (YLE), France (France TV), Germany (ARD and ZDF), Great Britain (BBC), Ireland (RTÉ), Italy (RAI), Netherlands (NPO), Portugal (RTP), Spain (RTVE), Sweden (SVT), Switzerland (RTS) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The results indicate that the corporate projection of PSM was increased by emphasising their role as essential services and their defence of the values that characterise them. The pandemic forced the adaptation of programme production from technical standards to an emotional approach, accelerating a formal hybridisation with native online contents. Dependence on software grew and newsmaking processes were altered towards 'remote journalism'. Changes are drawn that may be maintained in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La investigación se centra en analizar la interacción en la gestión de comunicación online para generar valor y para ello analiza las webs y la participación en redes sociales generalistas de las televisiones públicas europeas. Se presta atención preferente a los contenidos corporativos y a la información emitida por las cadenas públicas sobre si mismas para aproximarse a sus niveles de transparencia, de honestidad y de compromiso social que influyen en su reputación como corporación. Se revisan las características de su modelo de interrelación con las audiencias externas y se identifican y analizan los documentos o protocolos de normas o recomendaciones de gestión de actuación en redes sociales (guidelines) para públicos internos. El objetivo es identificar políticas de gestión de social media en entornos públicos y, preferentemente de las principales cadenas de televisión europeas, y analizar su contribución a la creación de lo púbico como valor asociado a su imagen. Para el análisis de interactividad se trabaja sobre una muestra de siete emisoras: RTVE (España), France Televisions (Francia), RAI (Italia), BBC (Gran Bretaña), RTP (Portugal) y ARD/ ZDF (Alemania) Para el estudio de las guidelines se recurre, además, a una comparativa de las televisiones europeas con las guías de entidades referenciales en el ámbito de la comunicación en Estados Unidos y Canadá: NPR (EEUU), CBC (Canadá), las agencias de noticias Associated Press y Reuters, y los diarios The Washington Post y Los Ángeles Times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The migration of audiences to digital environments has motivated the media to develop a content distribution strategy that has a presence in these new spaces. In the case of European public broadcasters, they have strengthened their digital news services and have built video-on-demand platforms where they organise and screen their products. Even so, the overload of information and content reaching users forces corporations to look for new mechanisms to present an adequate, interesting and diverse offering to each of their followers. This research project analyses the use of artificial intelligence in the recommendation systems implemented by 14 European public broadcasters in Germany (ARD and ZDF), Belgium (VRT and RTBF), Denmark (DR), Spain (RTVE), Finland (YLE), France (France TV), Great Britain (BBC), the Netherlands (NPO), Ireland (RTÉ), Italy (RAI), Sweden (SVT) and Switzerland (RTS). The results reveal that there is no unanimity among the corporations with regard to the operation and origin of these systems, which vary between homemade developments, acquired from third parties, or collaborative solutions. Operators differentiate between news recommendation processes and those executed on their VoD platforms and aim to distance their systems from those of commercial media, for which they have already started working on a public service media (PSM) algorithm that includes traditional public media values, avoids filter bubbles, and pays special attention to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]