Search

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]

The article analyzes the increasing transfer of ownership to the sources as newsmaking engines and drift of journalism as a social reference to current business information. The research focuses on the result of 673 interviews with journalists of Galicia (Spain) about levels of restraint in the construction of the agenda, the perceived balance between journalistic standards, political and economic to select and rank the news, the initiative in relationships and how to contact journalists with their sources, and professional aspects that are recognized and valued in newsrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As artificial intelligence (AI) gains space in the media, public broadcasters are testing and experimenting with these technologies to raise their services to the new standards of the audiovisual ecosystem. From algorithms that help recommend the most suitable content for users, to others that detect news and automate some of the tasks of journalists, these tools are increasingly present in public audiovisual corporations. The data were obtained from semi-structured in-depth interviews with a convenience sample of 15 corporations from 12 countries. The results reflect a heterogeneous application of artificial intelligence in corporations, oriented towards the automatic creation of content from structured data, the improvement of audience interaction through chatbots, and personalisation or verification. The implementation of these technologies also poses major challenges. Firstly, the economic cost of adapting these systems to each corporation and the difficulties in hiring experts to develop AI solutions prevent a complete deployment of these tools in public broadcasters. As main conclusions, we have understood that AI as a "culture" is believed to be vital for the public audiovisual services of the future, although its application is still far from being a standard and generally does not occupy a relevant strategic position in the innovation departments of corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]