[Commlist] Call for Paper Proposals: RIPE@2020 - Public Service Media's Contribution to Society

**********************************************************************************
* 2020 Conference of the International Association of Public Media 
Researchers / RIPE@2020
* * October 28-30, 2020, in Geneva (Switzerland)
*
* Call for Paper Proposals: * "Public Service Media's Contribution to 
Society"
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2020 is an exciting year for public media research: The RIPE initiative 
is transforming into the International Association of Public Media 
Researchers and the tenth biennial conference jointly organized by the 
University of Fribourg's Department of Communication and Media Research 
(DCM) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will take place on the 
premises of EBU's Geneva headquarters. The conference will offer an 
opportunity for celebrating RIPE's legacy and the 70th anniversary of 
the EBU.

Conference Theme
***************
Public Service Media (PSM) organizations across Europe and beyond are 
increasingly under pressure.  Due to digitization, media use is changing 
rapidly, with streaming services and online platforms gaining in 
importance and making it harder for legacy media to hold their ground. 
This affects both public and private media. With users and advertising 
shifting to search engines and social networks, the business model of 
newspaper publishers is also under pressure, which, in turn, leads to 
disagreement about PSM's online activities. In addition, many 
policy-makers are highly critical of PSM due to a belief in the 
efficiency of market solutions or - especially in the case of right-wing 
populist parties -  for political reasons. As a result, both PSM's role 
in a digital environment and its funding  are under scrutiny. PSM seem 
to be constantly in the position of having to defend themselves. 
Following attempts at demonstrating the "public value" of PSM, the 
discussion is now turning towards the concept of PSM's "contribution to 
society". Communication and media scholars need to critically discuss 
the analytical value and the usefulness of new concepts that are 
circulated in industry and policy-making. The 2020 conference 
of the International Association of Public Media Researchers 
/ RIPE@2020 thus focuses on the concept of contribution to society.

Presumably, it is uncontroversial to claim that PSM need to make a 
particular contribution to society in order to have a continuous reason 
to exist in media landscapes characterized by competition and abundance. 
And it should also be self-evident that PSM's contribution should be 
distinct and distinctive from what private media and online platforms 
(e.g. social media) offer. However, beyond these general statements the 
concept of contribution to society raises the important question of 
which contributions to which society. After all, society is changing. 
Research has focused on a number of trends like transnationalization, 
neo-liberalization, digitization or individualization that deeply affect 
modern societies. Audiences in different media systems are not only 
confronted with more media products than ever before and can become 
involved in production themselves but are also less homogenous or 
monolithic than they were in the past. These trends thus radically alter 
the relationship between professional media organizations and citizens. 
Moreover, they challenge the notion of an all-encompassing public 
sphere, nurturing new ideas like, for instance, of a network of public 
spaces.

Consequently, it is necessary to rethink the role of media organizations 
in general and PSM in particular in a more fragmented society. On the 
one hand, this involves refining the societal contribution of public 
service. Starting from the notion that PSM should, as McQuail (2010, p. 
178) put it, "serve the public interest by meeting the important 
communication needs of society and its citizens", these needs (e.g., 
contribution to democratic governance and culture, production of 
information and knowledge, cohesion and integration, or progress) and 
the ways PSM can address these needs in unique ways other media cannot 
have to be identified. On the other hand, it is also necessary to 
modernize the ways in which PSM provide their contribution to society. 
Beyond producing content for all kinds of distribution channels, 
platforms and usage scenarios (ranging from the living room to mobile 
consumption), PSM have the chance to involve citizens in production and 
to evolve the ways in which their content reaches audiences (e.g., 
personalization based on algorithms). Moreover, it is necessary to 
discuss how the contribution of PSM to society can be measured.

In order to be meaningful for society and to have an effect on PSM 
organizations, "contribution to society" needs to be more than just an 
instrument of legitimacy management by organizations under pressure. 
While communicating the many valuable contributions of PSM is important, 
the task at hand is not solving a communication problem. The concept is 
useless if it is 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 
paying for and talking about. Seen in this light, critically analyzing 
the concept of "contribution to society" is not only a worthwhile task 
for communication and media scholars but also a meaningful undertaking 
for the future of PSM.

Topics of Working Groups
*********************
Scholars from various research fields of media and communication as well 
as from neighboring disciplines are invited to submit abstracts for both 
conceptual and empirical contributions addressing one or more of the 
following topics. The topics will comprise the working group structure 
for this conference.

(1) Communication Needs of Changing Societies
Starting from the idea that PSM should meet the communication needs of 
society and its citizens, societal change raises the question of which 
contributions are necessary today in order to meet these needs. 
Societies are more diverse than in the past; many democracies witness 
the ascent of populist parties and illiberal leaders; the amount of 
media content available to citizens is bigger than ever; the 
commercialization and concentration of media is uninhibited; platforms 
and streaming services gain in importance with respect to media use. In 
light of these changes, it is necessary to rethink the contribution of 
PSM. What role can PSM play in restoring the trustworthiness of media 
and institutions? How can PSM mediate between societal groups and 
integrate societies that are drifting apart? How do PSM contribute to 
political participation, culture life, and the realization of 
individuals' full potential? And how can we measure the impact of PSM 
and its contribution to society? We invite paper proposals that deal 
with the contribution of PSM in changing societies, how this 
contribution needs to adapt, and how it differs from the performance of 
commercial media.

(2) New Forms of Contribution and Distinctiveness
In order to be able to make a contribution to society and generate 
positive externalities, the content produced by PSM need to reach 
citizens in the first place. In today's media landscapes characterized 
by a plethora of broadcasting channels and online services this is not 
necessarily the case anymore. Hence, producing content for linear 
channels and offering these broadcasts on demand is not sufficient. Many 
PSM invest in web-only content that they also make available 
via third-party platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. 
And gradually, there is an understanding that "the" internet is not 
simply an additional distribution channel but allows for a 
personalization of content using algorithms. However, private media show 
little enthusiasm for these new forms of content provision by PSM and 
worry about market distortion. Which possibilities exist for PSM to 
reach audiences in a digital environment? What could a public service 
algorithm look like? And how should public and private media co-exist 
and/or collaborate in the online world? We invite paper proposals that 
deal with new forms of contribution, the distinctiveness of PSM, its 
relationship to and possibilities for collaboration with private media 
and platforms, and the shift from broadcasting to a personalized 
streaming service.

(3) Involving Citizens, Building Communities
Digitization fundamentally alters the relationship between media 
organizations and citizens. This change poses a huge challenge for all 
media organizations. Whereas in the past audiences only mattered when 
measuring media use, now there is a need to adjust media 
production: journalism needs to become more dialogic in nature as 
instant feedback and criticism is now possible; and users can contribute 
to reporting in various ways, e.g. as informants or via 
crowdsourcing. Yet beyond media production, the changed relationship to 
their audience also offers an opportunity for PSM to really become a 
media organization of the people, by the people and for the people. What 
possibilities are there to involve citizens in decision-making within 
PSM or to engage in dialogue that informs decision-making? How can PSM 
build a community among their users that also strengthens their 
legitimacy? And how does PSM matter in individuals' lives in ways that 
metrics of audience research cannot capture? We invite paper 
proposals that deal with the importance of audiences for PSM, the 
involvement of citizens within PSM, and ways to reinvigorate the rooting 
of PSM in society.

(4) Governance, Communication and Legitimacy Management
Recent reforms of media policy have also led to stricter regulation of 
PSM. On the one hand, in many countries the remit of PSM - especially 
with respect to online activities - has been defined more 
firmly  and new services require public value tests. On the other hand, 
while still having better conditions than private media struck by 
crisis, PSM are expected to be more efficient or confronted with 
considerable budget cuts. Like other media organizations PSM respond to 
regulatory pressure and try to influence policy-making in their own 
interest. Concepts like "contribution to society" thus also can be seen 
as a strategic instrument of legitimacy management to deal with 
expectations of stakeholders. Is the concept of contribution an empty PR 
tool or is it inducing real change within PSM organizations? How does 
the interplay between policy-makers and PSM work in practice? And what 
role can communication scholars play in critically accompanying the 
change of media policy, PSM organizations and their contribution to 
society? We invite paper proposals that scrutinize the concept of 
contribution, focus on the politics of media policy, and the role of 
communication in the governance of PSM.

Submission Requirements
*********************
Paper proposals may be submitted via "Easy 
Chair" at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ripe2020. To do so, 
you need an "Easy Chair" login. If you do not have one yet, you can 
create one.
Please enter the following information into the online submission form:
- the name(s), e-mail-address(es), location(s) and organization(s) of 
the author(s);
- the paper's working title;
- an extended abstract (max. 750 words) explaining the main messages of 
the paper and how it contributes to the conference theme;
- 3-5 keywords;
- the two working group topics the paper is most closely related to.

Additionally, the abstract needs to be uploaded as a Microsoft Word 
file. Please make sure that your Word file is anonymized and does not 
contain any indication of the author(s) either in the text or in meta data.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed (double-blind) by a scientific 
committee. The evaluation criteria are:
1. Relevance to the conference theme and fit with one of the working 
group topics.
2. Conceptual and analytic quality as well as theoretical foundation.
3. Clarification of methodology if the paper will report on empirical 
research.
4. Relevance to PSM management and practice.
5. Generalizability of insights and findings.

Empirical research is highly valued, but we also welcome insightful 
philosophical, critical and theory-driven papers.

RIPE conferences focus on substance, dialogue and results. We therefore 
limit acceptance to about 60 papers. Each paper is assigned to a working 
group. At best we assign 9-12 papers to each group so that every paper 
has sufficient time for presentation and, most importantly, discussion.

Submissions are due February 29, 2020.

Decisions on acceptance will be announced on April 15, 2020.

Full papers need to be submitted by September 1, 2020 via "Easy Chair" 
at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ripe2020.
The conference takes place over two and a half days, starting late on a 
Wednesday morning and ending on Friday around noon. The conference 
language is English.
The International Association of Public Media Researchers plans to 
publish a selection of the papers in a peer-reviewed book handled by 
NORDICOM publishers.

Program Committee:
*****************
Maria Michalis (Westminster University, London)
Marko Milosavljević (University of Ljubljana)
Julia Pohle (WZB Berlin Social Science Center)
Manuel Puppis (University of Fribourg)
Roberto Suárez Candel (European Broadcasting Union)
Hilde Van den Bulck (Drexel University, Philadelphia)



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