German media manager: "Public broadcasters of Europe, let's all join Mastodon!"
German media manager: "Public broadcasters of Europe, let's all join Mastodon!"
In this guest post, Alexander Plaum, Innovation Manager at Deutsche Welle (DW), writes about his team's exceptionally positive experience with microblogging in the Fediverse. He also explains why all public broadcasting professionals should try out Mastodon.
Alexander Plaum, Innovation Manager at Deutsche Welle (DW), writes about his team's exceptionally positive experience with microblogging in the Fediverse. He also explains why all public broadcasting professionals should try out Mastodon (and other decentralized social media).
"So what are the skeptics waiting for? Everybody has to prepare posts and threads and multimedia soc med content bits anyway – why not put them out on Mastodon? Imho, there's nothing to lose, only a new (rather interesting) audience to gain," writes Plaum.
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can they retain their current funding levels if they focus on the fediverse?
How are those two related?
perhaps they arent. in America, public broadcasters receive some part of their funding via PBS, corporate/private donations, etc - no idea if it's similar for European public broadcasters or not - hence, the question
I still don't get how it's related. Some of the funding sources specify that the media outlet can't use Mastodon?
I think the idea is that the funding might come with conditions to reach a significant % of the audience. E.g. often public broadcasters have a remit of 99% of population coverage with their broadcast technology, while private stations have much lower or no legally obligatory reception target.
I don't think that's a big obstacle in this case though.
The European model used to be empowering the public broadcaster to collect a TV licensing fee, but is now moving to direct tax payer subsidy because internet streaming made that too easy to circumvent
oh nice, a real answer! thanks, that's really interesting.
It was a very good system. Collecting it's own fees added a degree of separation between government and public broadcaster and protected it's independence.
In theory yes, in reality no.
Speaking for Germany.
You think German public media is not independent from the state?
They're pretty independent, but maybe not independent enough for some? I mean it's no issue concerning Deutsche Welle, they are specifically non-independent as an institution of German culture politics. But the public broadcasters have supervisory bodies that are composed by law and contain
representatives of socially relevant groups, such as political parties, trade unions, social organizations, churches, etc., as defined in the broadcasting laws of the federal states [...] whereby the political parties - limited by the courts - do not hold more than one third of the seats.
This does not take into account how the representatives of the christian churches always vote with the christian parties and vice versa, the atheist representative is also a member of a political party and many social organizations depend in their work on the goodwill of the government.
Imho. that's not a problem, politics touches everything so you'll always find political connections of some kind everywhere. But seeing as our neonazi party is gaining momentum, maybe we should think about further reducing political influence, so it doesn't fall into their hands in a worst case scenario. Or we could reduce religious influence, following recent waves of Germans leaving their churches.