Public Policies for Public Service Media: the UK and the German Cases (with warnings/lessons from the USA), conference at University of Westminster and the BBC, London.

. The paper provides an element of empirical analysis of policy to date and also contains an element of policy prescription. It focuses on the impact of new technologies and changing media markets on public service broadcasting. In its first part the paper explores the strategic and policy responses to these challenges of media policy makers, regulators and the public service broadcasters in Germany and the UK. The first part of the paper examines the issue of ‘state aid’ and the public service broadcasters’ new media engagement, not least because private sector actors have invoked EU competition law as a strategy to restrain the PSBs’ new media engagement. The paper looks at the development of the Public Value Test in the UK and its equivalent in Germany, the Three-Step-Test (Drei Stufen Test). The second part the paper explores the issue of how to maintain a plurality of public service players and content, a subject that has so far been seen as being much more relevant to the UK case than Germany. This part of the paper also considers the question about whether new forms of support for public service media should be developed alongside established public service broadcasters. This part of the paper draws on the US experience and on the radical ideas of American media reformers. It points to the impact of the Internet in undermining traditional business models for commercial media (the crisis of newspaper journalism in particular) and in stimulating new forms of public interest media activism that deserve public support. The paper suggests the need for ‘technology neutral’ interventionist support to ensure the continued fulfilment of certain important ‘public service’ journalistic functions across a range of electronic delivery systems. While accepting the need to generously fund the existing public service broadcasters as has been done in Germany and the UK, the paper explores ways of supporting public service journalism beyond these institutions. The paper sees public service plurality as a crucially important concept for the digitally converged future and it argues the merit of the concept of establishing a new public service institution – along the lines of the Public Service Publisher concept developed, then dropped, by Ofcom – to distribute funds to a range of public service digital content providers.