September 27-28, 2021
Online conference
Public Service Media (PSM) organizations across Europe and beyond are increasingly under pressure. 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. The business model of newspaper publishers is under pressure, which, in turn, leads to disagreement about PSM’s online activities. And many policy-makers are highly critical of PSM due to a belief in the efficiency of market solutions or for political reasons. As a result, both PSM’s role in a digital environment and its funding are under scrutiny.
Increasingly, PSM organizations are using the “contribution to society” concept to demonstrate their public value. Yet scholars need to critically discuss the analytical value and the usefulness of new concepts that are circulated in industry and policy-making – the RIPE@2021 conference offers such an opportunity.
RIPE@2021 will take place as a virtual conference on Monday, September 27, 2021, in the afternoon, and Tuesday, September 28, 2021, in the morning (Central European Time). As a positive side effect of the virtual format, all interested scholars may participate free of charge.
RIPE@2021 offers:
- A keynote speech by Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich, Director Digital Society Initiative) titled “Society Rules”.
- A keynote speech by Gilles Marchand (Director-General SRG SSR) tilted “SRG SSR Public Value Approach: Managing Our Contribution to Society – A Swiss Perspective”.
- The session “How Practitioners and Scholars Can Work Together to Demonstrate the Value of PSM” discussing the potential and pitfalls of collaboration between academics and PSM practitioners.
- A closing plenary session providing answers to some overarching conference questions.
- And dozens of paper presentations focusing on the four conference themes “Communication Needs of Changing Societies”, “New Forms of Contribution and Distinctiveness”, “Involving Citizens, Building Communities”, and “Governance, Communication and Legitimacy Management”.
There will be no live presentations at RIPE@2021. All presentations will be pre-recorded and participants can watch them before the conference starts. The live sessions will be entirely devoted to discussion. While the plenary sessions are open to all registered participants, working group sessions are restricted to paper presenters. However, all registered participants have access to all the presentations and papers.
To see the complete program and to register for the conference, please visit https://www.unifr.ch/dcm/en/ripe-2021