scholarly journals Rethinking Public Service Broadcasting in the Age of Economic Pressures. A Case Study of Kenya Broadcasting Corporation

2017 ◽  
Vol 170 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Tania Lim ◽  
Azad Bali ◽  
Marcus Moo

Does public service broadcasting (PSB), with its 20th-century state-controlled and state-funded structure, still have a role to play in increasing access, public participation and a strong national media system in today’s globalising East Asia? This article, by taking Singapore as a case study, examines why and how traditional PSB media players have been forced to change their institutional and transactional responses to the ‘shocks’ of digitisation. In particular, it examines how the rise of Web 2.0, with its de-territorialised media services and social media, challenges PSB’s relevance as trends towards universal access, a greater participatory culture and active audiences render PSB content increasingly anachronistic.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roel Puijk

Abstract Public-service broadcasters are compelled to seek innovative ways to fulfil their publicservice functions in an increasingly competitive environment. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) has been experimenting with new programme formats and cross-media concepts. The concept of slow television was developed by the regional office in Bergen. On July 16, 2011, they started a five-day live broadcast from one of the cruise ships that sailed up the Norwegian coast from Bergen in southern Norway to Kirkenes near the Russian border. The broadcast was a huge success. I take this programme as a case study and provide an analysis from the perspective of innovation within public-service broadcasting. The article addresses the following questions: 1) In what way was the programme innovative? 2) How was the programme accepted and produced? 3) What accounts for the success of the broadcast in terms of number of viewers and popular engagement?


2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hogarth

Abstract: This study of public-affairs programs suggests that Canadian television hardly functioned as a modern disciplinary apparatus in its initial years. In the early 1950s, Canadian broadcasters sought to stake out and strategize a "middle ground" between U.K. (information) and U.S. (entertainment) TV, featuring public-affairs programs that Canadians would actually choose to watch in a more or less competitive North American broadcast market. However, newsmagazines and traditional long-form documentaries consistently violated the early pedagogical protocols of Canadian television and thus call into question conventional notions of public-service broadcasting.These shows and the controversies they generated should make us rethink Eurocentric theories about public-service broadcasting as a quintessential disciplinary machine. Résumé: Cette étude sur les émissions d'affaires publiques suggère que la télévision canadienne ne fonctionnait guère comme appareil disciplinaire moderne pendant ses premières années. Au début des années cinquante, la radiodiffusion canadienne chercha une position intermédiaire stratégique entre celle des Britanniques (axée sur l'information) et celle des Américains (axée sur le divertissement), mettant l'accent sur une programmation d'affaires publiques qui intéresserait véritablement les téléspectateurs canadiens dans un marché de la radiodiffusion nord-américain passablement concurrentiel. Cependant, à l'époque, les téléreportages et les documentaires traditionnels à long métrage négligèrent les protocoles pédagogiques de la télévision canadienne et mirent ainsi en question les notions conventionnelles de la radiodiffusion du service public. Ces émissions et la controverse qu'elles suscitèrent devraient nous faire repenser les théories eurocentriques qui envisagent la radiodiffusion publique comme modèle de machine disciplinaire.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (69) ◽  
pp. 090-115
Author(s):  
Jannick Kirk Sørensen

Historically, public service broadcasting had no quantifiable knowledge aboutaudiences, nor a great interest in knowing them. Today, the competitive logic of themedia markets encourage public service media (PSM) organizations to increasedatafication. In this paper we examine how a PSM organization interprets the classicpublic service obligations of creating societal cohesion and diversity in the newworld of key performance indicators, business rules and algorithmic parameters.The paper presents a case study of the implementation of a personalization systemfor the video on demand service of the Danish PSM ‘DR’. Our empirical findings,based on longitudinal in-depth interviewing, indicate a long and difficult processof datafication of PSM, shaped by both the organizational path dependencies ofbroadcasting production and the expectations of public service broadcasting.


Author(s):  
Oranit Klein Shagrir

KAN, the new Israeli public service broadcasting corporation, was established in 2015 to replace the declining, 40-year-old, PSB. This unique situation constitutes an intriguing case study for exploring several interrelated academic and professional contemporary interrelated discussions: transforming PSB organisations into public service media and adapting their public mission to the digital age; political pressure on PSM organisations and their struggle for independence; and PSM's legitimacy in a challenging media environment. This paper identifies the strategies employed by KAN to manufacture legitimacy and consolidate the organisation's existence solely via online outlets, and the relation of these strategies to core PSM values.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Harper

Peter Bowker and Laurie Borg's three-part television drama Occupation (2009) chronicles the experiences of three British soldiers involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By means of an historically situated textual analysis, this article assesses how far the drama succeeds in presenting a progressive critique of the British military involvement in Iraq. It is argued that although Occupation devotes some narrative space to subaltern perspectives on Britain's military involvement in Iraq, the production – in contrast to some other British television dramas about the Iraq war – tends to privilege pro-war perspectives, elide Iraqi experiences of suffering, and, through the discursive strategy of ‘de-agentification’, obfuscate the extent of Western responsibility for the damage the war inflicted on Iraq and its population. Appearing six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, Occupation's political silences perhaps illustrate the BBC's difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document