Search

Public Service Media (PSM) across Europe and beyond are increasingly under pressure, with both their role in a digital environment and their funding widely scrutinised. As a result, PSM organisations are constantly in a defensive position. Following attempts to demonstrate their “public value”, discussion is now turning towards PSM’s “contribution to society”, a concept pushed by the European Broadcasting Union. Yet, to be meaningful for society and to influence PSM organisations, the concept must be more than just an instrument of legitimacy management. While communicating the valuable contributions of PSM is important, the concept is useless if limited to the question of how to better sell the contribution of PSM to citizens instead of guaranteeing that PSM actually serves the public interest and makes a contribution worth funding and discussing. This volume critically engages with the analytical value and usefulness of the contribution to society concept, related both to the EBU’s conceptualisation and to the larger, normative question of contribution. Such critical analyses are not only a worthwhile task for communication and media scholars, but also for practitioners and policy-makers involved in debates about PSM’s future. The first section of this volume defines and refines how PSM can serve the public interest by meeting the communication needs of society in unique ways that commercial media cannot. The second section discusses what PSM can be beyond broadcasting, touching upon personalised on-demand services, new forms of mobile distribution, and public service bots. The third section focuses on organisational change and innovation, ranging from citizen participation to transparency.

While many public service media (PSM) organisations remain in strong positions in their respective markets, digitalisation and convergence have led to new market constellations and changes in media use. These changes have led to fierce debates about the legitimacy, the remit, and the funding of PSM in the digital age. With its contribution to society concept, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is trying to address these challenges. Based on new institutionalism in organisation studies, we argue that the contribution to society concept is bound to fail if it only reinforces the neoliberal discourse that dominates media policy today. Instead, a more ambitious interpretation of the concept would offer PSM the opportunity to shift the policy debate away from a market-based discourse and towards one based on PSM’s core roles and responsibilities.