Media Governance and Industries Lab Blog

“Young audience? It’s always a question of which platforms, channels and forums. I think that the big players in Europe, in the field of public broadcasters, have a hard time complying with this because they are so big. And if you are big, you move slowly”.

Interview with Katharina Schell, editor in chief – Austrian Press Agency

By Katharine Sarikakis and Gentiana Ramadani 

Katharina Schell is concerned about the young generation a and younger audience. According to her, it is a challenge not only to reach and capture them as an audience in today’s world of abundant information on networks and the internet but especially to protect this generation from misinformation. Schell believes that today’s 17-18-year-olds are more vulnerable to misinformation, as they are distant from traditional media and rely on platforms that are not trustworthy. She considers public television to be a reliable source, but the question is how it can adapt to the current era of digitalization and effectively reach young people through various platforms.

In today’s rapidly evolving media landscape, the role of public service media (PSM) in fostering democratic debates and shaping national identity has become increasingly vital. As citizens, we rely on Public Service Media to provide an inclusive platform that promotes dialogue, informs us objectively, entertains and educates future generations about the principles of democracy. 

How can public service media ensure that the information they provide is trustworthy and fact-based, while navigating the subjective nature of truthfulness?

I would say in the DNA of public service media or broadcasting, they have the responsibility to mold the public. Public value media should be where the audience feels they can trust the information. I would say one of the foremost challenges for public service media is to make sure the information is trustworthy and fact-based. I’m very careful with the word truthfulness because that’s something up for debate. 

What does public service media mean for European democracy and for children as future citizens? 

I think public service media should be sort of the information backbone in the European discourse and European society. The place you can turn to if you want to be sure that you can get complete and (as far as possible) unbiased information. This includes all the criteria of quality journalism: unbiased, reliable, trustworthy information, and those who have the transparency of working in journalism. This is something that should be at the core of public service media companies. Of course, this means that European countries have to supply the legal framework for this. If you have a look at different countries, there are very different ways in which the public media sector is organized and regulated. This is something that’s not foremost the responsibility of the media outlets or the media companies, but the regulatory frameworks within the government bodies. As for young people and children, I think this is an extraordinary challenge not only for public service media and public broadcasters because we know that young audiences don’t necessarily turn to traditional forms and channels. So on the other hand, in the discussion about misinformation, you frequently hear complaints about the young audiences, or young people, not being able to discern reliable information from fake or misleading information. I think that’s only partly fair because digital millennials grew up with an abundance of sources, information, and channels, and they have learned to a certain extent how to deal with that. If you talk about people falling prone to conspiracy theories, telegram, Facebook groups, and so on, that’s not the young people, that’s not the 17 or18 years olds. They sort of have their digital native competence in the digital space and for public service broadcasters, this means they have to move where the young users are. It’s not enough to broadcast young television forums now at a given time and say this is our channel 1, for example, and you can go here at 5 pm for those 20 minutes that we produced just for the young audience. It’s always a question of which platforms, channels and forums. I think that the big players in Europe, in the field of public broadcasters, have a hard time complying with this because they are so big. And if you are big, you move slowly. There might be some regulatory issues as well. For example, in Austria, the ORF is not allowed to act as freely in the digital information world as it would like to. 

What about the APA? This unusual suspect, a news agency that works within a national context, but of course, feeds in also from an international context. Do you see any role of news agencies, for example, and their work with public service broadcasts and institutions, in supporting perhaps democracy and the citizens’ role in all of this? Are there any thoughts about that?

Unfortunately, we should be carefully and not generalizing news agencies as one sector. Upper is one of the special agencies because we are one of the very few agencies worldwide that were completely independent of state influence and state funding and who are owned by the media of the country. So we do provide, of course, huge public value, this is something that not only I say, or our CEO says, it’s a fact, but we are not publicly funded. So, if you look at the ORF, it has very strict regulations, it’s a foundation owned by basically every Austrian, so it’s not state-owned, but of course state regulated and it’s a public company. We are not a public company, we are a private company owned by Austrian media companies. As an independent agency, we think that we have a huge responsibility because we are a national Austrian agency, but we are not a public company. Upper distributes another news backbone for Austria. There are many news agencies in Europe or worldwide that are owned, influenced, or funded by the state or the government, and they are doing great jobs of course. And then there’s also the case of news agencies owned by one big company because that’s also completely legitimate and a form of organization, but it’s different from the approach that a news agency like Upper can follow.

What is the place of citizens in general thinking young communities and children in the case of ORF? How do you see the role of citizens in the governance of public service media right now? What kind of new ideas, experiments, and lessons have been learned, for Europe, as well as in public institutions? 

It’s a really difficult idea and I have been following the political discourse and discussions about this for I think 20 years. If you look at the governing bodies of ORF, you have 2 main governing bodies: the board of executives and the other one, which is an attempt to engage representatives from different groups of society. And this was funded in the early 2000s and nobody is really sure if it works, but nobody has a better idea of how to do it. How to engage Austrian citizens in public value and also how to make sure that the difference they hold in society is represented not only in the governing bodies but also in the journalistic products of public broadcasting. It’s a lot. There’s a saying in Austria, that every Austrian is an expert on Football and on TV programming because every time you are watching something on TV, you know that it’s not good because you already know it. But you wouldn’t want to have that many people having their say in how the programs are developed. I’m not sure if the international best practice models that actually. I mean I’m not so familiar with the BBC construction but there is some structure with a broader base for citizens and state holders from society. So on the other hand, you can see that even BBC recently has become and put under pressure from the government because legislation is affected. It all comes down to how can the public broadcasters of our time sort of legitimize what they are doing. Then of course you have the license fee problem. It is not a problem, they have to get funded someway. In Austria, we have discussed for a long time that it is justified that the public broadcaster has commercial funding and license fee funding. Of course, Austria is also a difficult country for electronic media because we are a small market, but there is a large language market. There is a license fee for every person in Austria who owns a TV set or a radio, and this is something that induces certain stubbornness in the audience because they are experts on TV programs, they know how it should be, they are not content, and then they even have to pay for it. And this is a discourse that is far from any media political or economic, it includes psychology. This is also something that a public broadcaster has to deal with.

Talking about citizens, future citizens, which is the youth, to whom large organisations are very slow in responding: Do you feel there is also a problem or a challenge of culture? Do you think there’s a sense of citizens not necessarily belonging in real to the shaping of media, public service media and media in the country? We don’t know how to include citizens and we don’t know what other practical ways exist to get them involved. Then by extension children have even less of a role in shaping the media. Since you have this historical experience, following and of course, experiencing the debates in Austria about where citizens belong in this big question of media having the role of serving the public, what are your reflections? 

Well, this is closely connected with the phenomenon of digital misinformation we have talked about before because the key question is ‘where do the citizens belong?’ if it comes to media. This is something that the citizens, or the audience, don’t know anymore and this is a very worrying phenomenon. For some years now, people have been saying there’s so much information and claims out there that they just don’t know what to believe anymore. Before we talk about engaging and exchanging with the citizens about how media is supposed to be shaped, we as journalists actually, I am a journalist, I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years now, have to go up to them, reach out to them, and just tell them if they don’t know where to get correct or fact-based information, come here. It’s our job as journalists to do this for you. This is what we’ve learned, this is what we are able to do. We try to find out and we will tell you in a way that you understand. It’s not because the citizen, the listener, or the reader is stupid, but because we know the world has become so immensely complex and it’s really hard to grasp and it’s hard to understand what all of this is about. I think this is a job for media, and I’m not only talking about public media right now. Sometimes in the past, journalists lost the audience in some aspects. And this is why the audience went on to other channels. I mean if my mobile phone just sort of pushes me news every other minute, unfortunately, they are pushed by telegram and not by a sort of reliable media outlet, I feel informed, sometimes overinformed and I don’t really question the information. Journalists think they have the platforms, the newspapers, the TV channels, and information programs and they are doing the best they can do, but the audience is elsewhere. And this is something we first have to work on before we go into any structural or conceptual debate, I think. We have to strive to go where the audience or where the citizens are. We have to tell them what we know, which sounds very big now.

*Austria Press Agency is Austria’s largest national news and press agency with headquarters in Vienna.