On 9-10 March Peggy Valcke from iMinds-KU Leuven’s ICRI/CIR presented REVEAL at the audiovisual conference “Strengthening the European audiovisual media market – for the development of the European identity”, organized by the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the EU.

 

On 9-10 March 2015, over 200 media experts, industry representatives, regulators and policy makers from all 28 EU Member States gathered in Riga at the initiative of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the EU to discuss the future of the EU regulatory framework for audiovisual media. All participants agreed that the current rules are increasingly under pressure as a result of convergence between television and the internet, the growing power of new intermediaries in the media ecosystem, increasing global competition, and changing consumer habits.

In 2013, the European Commission published its Green Paper on Media Convergence and invited stakeholders to share their views on the changing media landscape and borderless internet in particular on market conditions, interoperability and infrastructure, and implications for EU rules. Both the European Parliament and the Council have subsequently invited the Commission to initiate the revision process of the current legislative instrument for the audiovisual sector, the “Audiovisual Media Services Directive”. The so-called REFIT exercise will be carried out in 2015 by DG Connect, Unit G.1 ‘Converging Media & Content’ (headed by Lorena Boix Alonso), which is also the unit in charge of the REVEAL project.

Peggy Valcke from iMinds-KU Leuven’s ICRI/CIR was invited to address the plenary meeting at the conference on the topic of “Ensuring plurality and values in a converged media environment: Monitoring of national-level freedom and pluralism of the media”. She presented previous work carried out at KU Leuven and the European University Institute on developing and testing a risk-based system of indicators for media pluralism, made suggestions for EU regulatory action to address concerns about media pluralism, and presented the REVEAL project as a best practice of how interdisciplinary research can support qualitative journalism and a pluralistic media landscape. Her presentation can be found here.

More info about the conference is available here (conference press release) and here (conference agenda and speakers).

Editorial note / disclaimer:

This post and its contents have been provided by Peggy Valcke from iMinds-KU Leuven’s ICRI/CIR. It has been edited by Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle.