The European Broadcasting Union: corporate management and voluntary work

Institutional and theoretical context

Information as a public good is not a thing of nature, but a purposeful action. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu long observed that the media field is more often than not a dominated one either by the economic field, the political field or both (Bourdieu, 1996). When explaining the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu to American audiences, Rodney Benson pointed out that ‘each field is structured around the opposition between the ‘heteronomous’ pole representing economic and political capital (forces external to the field) and the “autonomous” pole representing the specific capital unique to that field’ (Benson, 1999: 464). The domination of the media field is a long-standing temptation, as it has traditionally functioned as a powerful amplifier and a lucrative enterprise. When economic domination prevails, the media contents and data are commodified and become merchandise on the market (Bilić et al., 2021; Fuchs, 2019). When political domination prevails, media is used as a mouthpiece of power and information is instrumentalised as a political privilege (Bajomi-Lazar, 2014; Dragomir, 2017). When both dominations are active, media is simply captured for the political and commercial ends of actors outside the media field (Dragomir and Aslama Horowitz, 2021; Schiffrin, 2018). When it comes specifically to public service media, Des Freedman argues that: ‘at their very best, PSM have improved an otherwise anaemic commercial landscape; at their worst, they are simply an accessory to state actors and contaminated media markets that reproduce elite power’ (2024: 1). I argue that while individually it is harder for media organisations to resist external pressures, the association at the international level can be a way to buffer third parties and their agendas. It is a reason why the European Broadcasting Union is an instructive object of study, that at first sight is resourceful enough to keep its purposeful action of information as a public good intact.

In my contribution, I explore this international association that got institutionalised around the idea of information as a public good by means of lucrative cooperation between public service broadcasters. It emerged after the Second World War, in a world where public service was the norm rather than the exception, and has continued to a time when priorities switched fundamentally towards profit and liberalisation. Thus, the object of study is the European Broadcasting Union, the largest association of public service media providers in Europe and beyond, servicing more than one billion people as audiences via its members. In order to make sense of EBU’s inner workings and whether its institutional practices prioritise information as a public good or have moved towards a neo-lib focus, I undertook an institutional analysis based on secondary data.

The main theoretical inspiration of this endeavour is neo-institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). The critical interpretation is aided by the perspectives provided by the political economy of the media (Golding and Murdock, 1997; Pedro-Carañana et al., 2024). Moreover, the field theory developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1993) allows the clarification of the limits and opportunities within this sphere of action and relations. No less important, the concept of habitus as socialised subjectivity helps clarify the specific dispositions and praxis doxa of the various institutional actors under scrutiny (Bourdieu, 1977). Thus, the research is based on a neo-institutional and post-structuralist understanding of a sector as a unit of analysis and considering the field ecosystem with its explanatory value (Bourdieu, 1993; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). The main exploratory research questions are: How does an association of public service media providers work in a neoliberal context? Is information practised as a public good in this institutional setting?

Public service media are not the most popular institutional actors lately; this paper attempts to move beyond commercial media contestation (Donders, 2013), populist attacks (Holtz-Bacha, 2021) and Eurovision music contest scandals and take a sober institutional look at the selected object of study in itself. The European Broadcasting Union is surprisingly under-researched, despite the fact that it is the largest association of public service media providers in the world. In the ten volumes dedicated to public service media ¹ in the most focused scholarship on the issue by RIPE@, ² there are only two subchapters that directly address EBU, ³ and only one full-fledged article, critical to the discursive approach of the organisation. ⁴ Overall, in almost 3000 pages on PSM, there are less than 100 text references to EBU and a dozen bibliographical references, most of them produced by EBU itself. It might be that EBU tries too hard to have a voice of its own and stresses its contribution to society, and sometimes this can be interpreted as PR and plainly an enforcement of a neo-lib discourse (Puppis and Ali, 2023). It is indeed pretty difficult to get through the communication shield of what the organisation wants the world to know about it.

What is the European Broadcasting Union?

The European Broadcasting Union is a decades-old nongovernmental organisation under the Swiss law, the largest association of public service media providers from Europe and beyond. It aims to set the basis for content and technology exchange, legal representation and innovation for its constituents. The European Broadcasting Union emerged after the Second World War, in a context of scarcity, as a cooperation between public broadcasters that could put in common and exchange their very resource-intensive broadcasting products on their own infrastructure. The American researcher Konrad Kressley observed almost half a century ago that: ‘Participation is on a voluntary basis, which means that the international network is more or less a non-commercial clearing house for bi-and multi-lateral program exchanges plus joint telecasts of Olympic games or overseas events’ (1978: 1045). In the first decades of its existence, the association benefitted most of the smaller and less resourceful members of the association, because the participation fee was proportional to the capacities of the members. ‘Transmission costs were originally calculated in such a way as to maintain a parity of expense between centrally located and more remote members of the system (…) According to their reasoning, vigorous exchange participation could not be realized without some formulation which eased the burden on the smaller and peripheral systems of the European network’ (Kressley, 1978: 1047).

Besides the European members, the union is benefitting members from North Africa and the Middle East, because membership is based on a technical rather than geographical definition. ⁵ ‘The EBU (…) opened itself originally to all broadcast organizations within an area of Europe as defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). With technical considerations in mind, the ITU had at one point divided the world into a number of broadcast regions, with the European area including countries from the Middle East and North Africa’ (Kressley, 1978: 1048).

The European Broadcasting Union has more than tripled its reach in terms of the audiences of its constituents in recent decades. Fifty years ago, there was a combined reach of 300 million people, at the moment it reaches more than one billion people via its national PSM constituents. As of October 2023, EBU has 68 active members from 56 countries and 31 associates from 20 countries all over the world. ⁶

In order to be part of EBU, all members need to be public service media providers as defined by their respective national laws; popularity, independence, or trust in these PSMs are not criteria for qualifying as an EBU member. EBU operates the Eurovision and Euroradio telecommunications networks on which television and radio broadcasts are distributed to its members. It also operates the daily Eurovision news exchange in which members share breaking news footage.

The income basis of EBU is represented by the membership fees – composed of an association fee, a news exchange fee and a radio and music fee, ⁷ sports bargaining and broadcasting ⁸ and the capital resulting from selling the commercial branch of EBU in 2023. ⁹ These income streams feed into the exchanges, innovation, legal and advocacy activities carried out by the corporate units of EBU together with the voluntary national PSM working groups under the umbrella of the organisation. The Code of Finance of EBU is the instrument that operationalises the penalties that derive from non-fee compliance, which range from limitations of the right to be represented in a specialised committee or to be elected in the Board, to withdrawal of the right to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest and sports events, and as far as suspension. ¹⁰

Not unlike platforms, the main organisational engine of EBU is cooperation rather than competition (Caplan, 2023; Petre, 2023). While EBU started as a solidarity-based cooperation, it is currently naming itself ‘the business of PSM’. It is coined as well as ‘the trade association of public service media in Europe’ (Puppis and Ali, 2023: 10). It promises ‘access to a wide network of like-minded people that can provide you with expertise and knowledge to help you navigate the fast changing media industry’ (EBU Your Guide to EBU Services, 2023b). It mainly offers its many services to its members on a yearly subscription basis. At the moment, some of its institutional practices are clearly focused on lucrative activities, especially when it comes to the hard bargains of sports rights and commercial services to third parties. It seems that EBU takes on the neo-lib discourse of trade and market. In this way, it continues to make sense to its stakeholders in the media market. Many employees of the corporate EBU institutional layer had previously served in the commercial media and telecom sectors. While the discourse and the lucrative institutional practices of the permanent employees are about trading success, the activities related to national PSMs are bound and defined by the Statutes, which have cooperation, democratic representation and public service as the core. Thus, EBU talks ‘trade’ to its business partners and talks ‘public service’ to its constituents. EBU is a lucrative cooperation for its members, but using free labour from its national constituents as I will demonstrate in the pages to follow.

EBU governance

EBU is an autonomous, self-governing organisation. While its constituents, national PSMs, are ‘in the shadow of politics’ (Haggart and Keller, 2021), and accountable to their individual national polities, the union itself is accountable only to its representatives. It sometimes positions itself on top of politics as EBU is as well referred to as a large international organisation, alongside UNESCO, the Council of Europe or the European Commission (Aslama, 2010; Aslama Horowitz and Ferrell Lowe, 2020; Palokangas, 2007); it even takes the privileged position of holding politics accountable. For example, in 2014 ‘EBU published an analysis based on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to freedom of expression and information (ECHR). This report responded specifically to Greece's decision to shut down its public service broadcaster, ERT, in 2013. The report concluded that Article 10 gives public service media legal protections against State actions that are arbitrary or disproportionate relative to the legitimate aims that a State may pursue, and obliges the State to (re) establish a media system that meets the general requirements of Article 10’ (Aslama Horowitz and Nieminen, 2016: 100). EBU seems to be in the privileged position of not being subject to direct political pressure, given its international, autonomous status.

In terms of the institutional design of the association, a national PSM voluntarily joins the association on an application basis. Upon acceptance, it needs to adhere to the rules, including the practices of representation and service in specialised committees. At the level of governance, EBU is democratic. The General Assembly, a forum composed of all the delegations of the national PSMs, elects eleven representatives from among the national PSMs top leadership, to form the Executive Board (formerly the Council of Administration). ¹¹ The term of a board member is 2 years. While the Executive Board is in charge of current decisions, the General Assembly is the final decision-maker in the union. As of June 2023, Article 6.1 of EBU Statutes stipulates that: ‘The General Assembly is the supreme body of the EBU and possesses all the powers necessary to accomplish the Union’s purposes. It holds the inalienable power regarding the overall supervision of all other EBU bodies’ (EBU Statutes, 2023a). EBU regulates the behaviour of its participants by means of its by-laws, statutes and codes. These documents are clear about the requirements for representation and financial contributions.

The elected representatives of the Executive Board are the ones that validate the General Director and his management team; the duration of their service is not limited in the same way as that of the board. The management represents the corporate, paid, institutional layer of EBU and is composed of specialised departments: media, legal and policy, technology and innovation, sports and human resources. The professionals working in this layer of the organisational structure of EBU are employed by the organisation, more than 400 people, while the General Assembly specialised committees and expert groups are composed of professionals from national PSMs. It is interesting to observe that basically EBU has access to a large pool of talents from national PSMs, and it does not have to pay for it, but the PSMs pay to be part of EBU.

On a governance level, not unlike in the EU institutions, once elected in the Executive Board, the members do not represent first and foremost their respective national constituents, but the whole of the union. ‘The 11 members are senior representatives of EBU Member organizations and are elected by the General Assembly for a two-year tenure’. ¹²

When it comes to the management team of EBU, it is currently run by Noel Curran from the Irish PSM, and he has been in office since 2017. The management team can have more years of service than the Executive Board, but the former is observed and reports to the latter. The General Director has the discretion to appoint his/her teams, but he/she needs the approval of the General Assembly. There exists a basic checks-and-balances system between EBU and the national PSMs. Theoretically, none of the two institutional layers has an upper hand; the statutes institutionalise a continuous cross overview between EBU and the national PSMs. Nevertheless, while EBU has the capacity to penalise the lack of fee conformity of national PSMs, national PSMs have no way to penalise EBU; this is a one-way street.

The Assemblies are the largest specialised groups composed of members of national PSMs. From these assemblies, specialised committees are elected. ¹³ Further on, expert groups ¹⁴ and lately tech groups ¹⁵ are getting shaped for very dedicated tasks. In the wording of EBU, ‘assemblies active in the sectors of news, sports, radio, television, technology & innovation and legal & public affairs are also responsible for electing representatives from EBU Members to serve on the Committees that provide valuable strategic guidance for EBU activities in their respective sectors as well as approving the respective annual objectives for these Committees’. ¹⁶ Transnational teams of PSM experts get together and work for better news, formats, digital solutions, sports, tech innovations, etc. There, the constituents transfer know-how and innovate together.

The permanent departments of EBU and their institutional praxis

At the level of EBU, the main areas of institutional praxis can be identified in the management structure. ¹⁷ Below I analyse the permanent departments of EBU that cater directly to content and policy. These are media, tech and innovation and legal and policy. I do not go in-depth about the sports department, and I leave aside the department that deals with the personnel: human resources.

The media and technology and innovation departments are two specific units within the permanent EBU structure. I decided to analyse them together because their contributions feed each other and the general output of the union. Lately, the synergy between media and tech is part of the EBU strategic vision: ‘technology teams working in close collaboration with the content creators and editorial staff, driving for innovation (…) means jointly having access to the talent that can support new developments’ (EBU Tech Committee, 2021a, 2021b: 1). ¹⁸ The permanent departments of EBU are creating the framework where no less than sixty expert groups work on specific tasks. National PSMs feed expert groups such as specialist factual, kids news, audio storytelling, TV documentary, Eurovision song contest and contemporary music. ¹⁹ Thus, voluntary expert groups, composed of elected specialists from national PSMs gather around content-related issues, enhancing ‘the “Content is King” approach (…) recommended by the European Broadcasting Union [EBU], among others, as a response to digitalisation’ (Hujanen, 2016: 40). The media expert groups focus on editorial issues and generally on semantic diversity.

The tech and innovation department caters for around thirty tech expert groups composed of specialists from various national PSMs, such as AI and data, loudness (PLoud), artificial intelligence and metadata, hybrid and cloud-based production, and broadband distribution architectures. The tech division is increasingly important in the EBU architecture, as the number and depth of tech groups attest to. These groups are proposing solutions that align public service media to current digital developments and grow along mathematical diversity paths. The working together of the two divisions conserves the content-related priorities of information as a public good, while incorporating new technologies. It is interesting to observe that, unlike the high-tech platforms, the tech working groups of EBU do not have the upper hand. They are relatively new appurtenances of the far better-established content-related assemblies, committees and expert groups.

Convergence between media and tech: ‘A European perspective’

Current developments show a convergence between media and tech and innovation. The fundamental dynamic of EBU has generally been structured around exchange and cooperation. For example, ‘A European Perspective’ is a joint news exchange, translation and personalisation in-house project that has been in use by dozens of national PSMs since 2021. ²⁰ Until recently, language and technological barriers made the net volume of exchanged news quite low. In order to tackle these barriers, the media department and their colleagues from tech and innovation managed to build together a functional system: all the national PSMs that are part of this pooling of resources enjoy consequently a solid flow of news, on a daily basis and in real time. The system takes the shape of a special rubric on the PSM news websites where users from various countries find European news in their own language. The end user will receive recommended content that fits both his/her individual wishes, while keeping public interest and diversity as core principles. ²¹

The possibility of having a functional pan-European newsroom has been enhanced by two in-house innovations, EuroVox ²² and PEACH. EuroVox is an open toolbox, a software developed under the umbrella of EBU tech and innovation by national PSM professionals; it allows the translation of news from a European language to English and then to another European language. Basically, news produced by a national PSM and published there can further be used and published by another participant member, in real time and in the language of the PSM interested in that news. At the same time, what is distinctive about the approach to information, is the editorial function that remains central to the process. When it comes to selection and publication, the first and last choices are made by professional editors, and not an algorithm. ²³

PEACH – ‘personalisation for each’ is the other innovation that made possible ‘a European perspective’. It incorporates the algorithmic principles of user choice, but without commodifying data and with a focus on a diverse pool of choices. ²⁴ ‘Within the EBU, a group of PSM organizations have joined forces to develop (…) the “PEACH” project, which combines classic recommender algorithms (content-based filtering to find similar content and collaborative filtering to find similar users) with a novel mechanism to recommend diverse content. This can be seen as a first attempt to implement PSM-specific editorial values in an algorithm’ (Sørensen and Hutchinsonin, 2018: 99).

It is interesting to observe that in its early days, more specifically in 2021, ‘A European Perspective’ was financed as a project under the auspices of the European Commission, one of the traditional adversaries of PSM as a counter market institutional structuration. Currently, the project is expanding among the PSMs. As of 2024 Suspilne Ukraine and Ríkisútvarpid (RUV) Iceland joined this pan-European newsroom. It is currently in use by 19 PSM participants in 16 countries. Most importantly, last year 4.6 million people read the stories featured in the ‘a European perspective’ newsfeeds. ²⁵ The ‘a European perspective’ example shows that even though EBU is not a main producer of information itself, its institutional structure corporately manages to fructify the voluntary work of its constituents.

Legal and policy institutional praxis

A similar combination of corporate management and voluntary work can be found as well in the legal area of EBU. The permanent unit of lawyers and policy specialists of EBU work together with the elected representatives from national PSMs. A close look at the interface of EBU shows that the legal team has had interventions on all major European legislation that affect media: the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, Platform to Business Regulation, GDPR, Competition Law, State Aid Rules, Intellectual Property (IP), Spectrum and free to air regulation. The latest judicial front of EBU is the European Media Freedom Act, which has a committee of its own. ²⁶

According to EBU, the activities in the legal and policy department are structured around legal interventions that secure the public service remit of media. As a general practice, ‘our Legal and Policy team defines our policy positions together with our Members, and in consultation with the Legal and Policy Assembly, Legal and Policy Committee and our expert groups’. ²⁷ While the legal and policy team is composed of employed personnel of EBU, the experts from the Legal and public affairs assembly, public affairs committee and expert groups are employees of national PSMs, working together in order to accomplish commonly agreed tasks. The legal and policy committee is elected by the legal and public affairs assembly. ‘Its general role is to promote and defend public service media in Europe, particularly vis-à-vis the European Union, as well as to establish and implement the EBU’s European legal and public affairs strategy’. ²⁸

The permanent EBU corporate workforce and the voluntary professionals from national PSMs

When it comes to the institutional praxis of EBU, I focused on two institutional layers as they carry a large explanatory value. On the one hand, there are the permanent departments of EBU, with its permanent employees. On the other hand, there are professional groups, composed of employees of national PSMs, that cooperate under the umbrella of EBU for various professional projects. I argue that the permanent employees of EBU represent the neo-lib habitus, while in the professional working groups, we find mainly a public service habitus.

Hundreds of professionals from national PSMs become part of various working groups where they contribute their specific knowledge. They voluntarily work on projects with peers who are interested in the same things. At the same time, the corporate employees of media, tech and innovation, legal and policy departments formally run these working groups. The management units of EBU are providing the working groups with expertise, reports, meeting opportunities and ultimately materialising the efforts of the PSM professionals. This structuration makes the institutional setting dynamic and conducive to innovation through professional cooperation with low labour costs for EBU. Once materialised, the output of these working groups is fructified by EBU for its members and/or in lucrative services for third parties.

There is a great deal of cooperation and exchange of know-how inside the working groups, and all these activities are taking place with no pressure for commercial results. Conveniently for EBU, though, the journalists, editors, producers, engineers, IT and law specialists that serve in these groups are employed by their own national PSMs, not by EBU itself, and this makes this structuration both very rich in terms of expertise and emulation, as well as not a great cost on the association itself. At the same time, these working groups represent an interesting learning and emulation environment for the less resourceful PSMs.

The permanent departments are running the voluntary assemblies, committees, expert groups and tech teams composed of specialists from national PSMs: ‘Full participation of Members in EBU's activities are also ensured through a hierarchy of Assemblies, Committees and Expert Groups responsible for providing direction and guidance for specific sectors and activities’ (statutes). In institutional terms, I argue that EBU manages to create a network effect, not unlike a platform, whereby the more people are in these specialist groups, the more others wish to join and be part (Petre, 2023). It is in these professional fora where one can find the greatest diversity, innovations and a lot of media initiatives that are generated pro bono by national PSM employees.

Conclusion

EBU is institutionally built on cooperation, like platforms, and not on competition, like regular capitalist enterprises. It is a structural reason that makes this association quite fit in the current platform environment. The main findings of the research point to this interesting institutional design whereby the human resources of the various PSM constituents of EBU work together in an EBU-facilitated environment and produce public service innovation in media, from content to technical, from formats to AI, up to digital solutions and sports broadcasting. Information as a public good represents a common feature of the ones involved in the working groups, and it is also a way of transferring knowledge, good practices, and a special ethos of public service when it comes to information. EBU's practices of heavily involving PSM specialists who voluntarily contribute time and talent to EBU expert groups are effective in a neo-lib way, yet conducive to innovation and information as public good. The innovations come from teams composed of public service media professionals with a public service habitus. The outputs of these teams are further fructified by EBU whose management team is collected from various private and corporate organisations: a neo-lib habitus. Innovation through cooperation while conserving information as a public good is an interesting feature emerging from this legacy association. Given the basic remit of public service media inscribed in the national PSM laws as well as in the statutes and by-laws of EBU, information is socialised as a public good within the organisation; but it is traded as a commodity with third parties in the market. To sum up, EBU prioritises information as public good in relation to national PSMs and content as merchandise with its business partners.

EBU is a large and resourceful organisation in various ways: content exchanges, technological innovation, advocacy and lobbying. The combination of a neo-lib corporate layer with voluntary working groups from national PSMs makes EBU particularly effective. It looks like a new public management dream come true, except that EBU is not an accountable public organisation. Through the NGO structure, corporate management and voluntary work, it opens large avenues of cooperation for professionals to innovate together, at the end of the day enhancing information as a public good.