Building a European Media Platform

The pro­found changes to the media land­scape in the past two dec­ades have brought new chal­lenges to public service media out­lets. Digiti­zation and the inter­net have changed how media is con­sumed, bring­ing in­creased com­peti­tion and choice, mak­ing it more diffi­cult for public broad­casters like BR to achieve their man­date of deliv­ering inde­pen­dent, alter­native Ger­man and Euro­pean pro­gram­ming to citi­zens. Such pro­gram­ming is meant to ensure citi­zens have access to a diver­sity of infor­mation and per­spec­tives, which is cru­cial for a healthy de­moc­racy.

The Eu­ropean Media Plat­form aims to ad­dress this not only by facili­tating online media access and distri­bu­tion, but by creat­ing infra­struc­tures that en­cour­age stand­ardiza­tion, in­terop­erabil­ity, and re­source-sharing be­tween broad­cast­ers, streamlining the pro­duc­tion of high-quality con­tent for local and re­gional audi­en­ces.

For Lang, a student of the Elite Graduate Program "RESET", his intern­ship al­lowed him to see the ways in which re­spon­sibility issues that are at the core of his aca­demic work play out in a field of prac­tice. He says of his expe­rience, “It al­lowed me to draw con­nec­tions from theo­retical dis­cussions to practi­cal real-life pro­jects and there­fore really added value to the study pro­gram.”

Further­more, Lang was also able to further sharp­en his under­stand­ings of the com­plex dy­namics of re­spon­sibly em­ploy­ing new tech­nolo­gies. He ob­serves that in the Euro­pean Media Plat­form re­spon­sibility lies not merely in the broad­cast­ing of relia­ble infor­mation, but needs to be taken into ac­count across the entire sys­tem, in­volving dif­ferent actors, goals, pro­cesses, and infra­struc­tures.

Text: Elite Graduate Program "Responsibility in Science, Engineering and Technology"