Abstract

This article analyzes the strategies followed by the BBC channel to legitimize its role as public television through an approach to the citizens and a diversification of contents in order to face the challenge posed by the current fragmentation of audiences. The study is based on interviews with BBC news professionals about their concept of the public and their gaze on citizens. The aim of this paper is to identify ways to help TVE to face the challenge of its legitimating as public service television.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the models of Public Television in Spain (TVE) and Great Britain (BBC), within the different contexts in which both entities are created and developed. We understand that the features adopted by cultural industries do not obey to immovable determinations but are the result of political, economic and cultural circumstances. The discourse of professionals working in these two media -obtained trough in-depth interviews- will allow us to infer the concept of public service inspiring their work.

Abstract

Public service media (PSM) are in crisis throughout Europe. As a scenario for research, the two extremes of the background have been chosen: the first, BBC, is at the heart of media system, has become a model for the others and has just finished the particularly delicate challenge of renewal the fundamental law that is to rule over the next ten years; the second is on the periphery of public television, and in the extreme circumstances in Spain that have driven some of the television corporations to extinction, such as Canal 9 -Radiotelevisió Valenciana (RTVV). Using a method based on the use of semi-structured interviews and Delphi, the conception of these media models among their respective audiences is explored. 

Abstract

Public television has a mission to promote debate around topics of public interest. Twitter is the social metamedia used by TV programs to fulfil this task online. This research analyzes the capability of public television to generate an effective debate through Twitter and also looks at the relationship between physical audience and social audience. We apply a quantitative methodology that employs our own capture and treatment technique to examine the activity generated by the hashtags proposed by six television programs on BBC One, TV3, and La 1. The main finding shows that these programs fail in their mission to generate a robust public debate in Twitter; instead the discussion is generated by a recurrent group of users that control the debate flow around their comments. Finally, the physical audience is not a predictive factor of the social audience.