Convergence (special issue)

Deadline: April 4, 2025

Edited by: Hanne Bruun, Catherine Johnson, Tim Raats and Vilde Schanke Sundet

Over the past decade, the growth of global platforms has led to the rise of ‘platformisation’: the ‘penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms’ (Poell et al. 2019:1). This has specific implications for public service media (PSM), which now operate within a platform ecosystem in which a small number of largely US platforms determine the rules of the game (van Dijck et al., 2018). Platformisation has created the conditions for the emergence of global streaming services, such as Netflix, Disney+, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video, with which PSM compete for audiences, revenue and talent. These new forms of on-demand, data-driven video streaming services challenge the dominance that many PSM organisations once had as the principal providers of domestic audiovisual culture. For PSM organisations this is a double bind: as they have lost audiences to streaming services and platforms, they have also had to develop new on-demand services and online content that can only be delivered through the infrastructures owned by global platforms. Yet the way in which these challenges play out for PSM are context specific. Despite large-scale studies focused on comparing systemic political and economic factors, there are relatively few comparative studies of the organisational practices and cultural outputs of PSM organisations. This is a significant omission because a growing body of work argues that it is precisely in the areas of organisational practice and cultural output that the impact of platformisation on PSM is most keenly felt (see, for example, D’Arma et al., 2021; Iordache et al., 2024; Lassen, 2025).

In response, this special issue asks: How might a comparative approach help us to better understand PSM in the age of platforms? Comparison here could be across different ‘levels of influence’ (Havens and Lotz, 2016) within the media industries, such as comparing policy/regulation and organisational practices, or comparing organisational practices with cultural outputs. In this sense, we particularly welcome articles that take a mixed method approach, combining (for example) document analysis, interviews and/or analysis of texts. Or it could be comparison across different platforms and/or contexts. We particularly welcome studies that compare across more than two contexts and studies that look beyond the Western contexts that have dominated studies of PSM.

Indicative topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Comparative analysis of the changing organisational cultures of PSM
  
• Comparative analysis of PSM commissioning, publishing and/or distribution practices
  
• Comparative analysis of PSM programming/content
  
• Novel methodological approaches to studying PSM in a comparative context
  
• Comparative analysis of the values underpinning PSM organisations
  
• Mixed method approaches that compare across policy, production and/or texts
  
• Theoretical approaches to comparative media systems analysis
  

Please submit a 500-750 word abstract that includes a short statement outlining how your proposed article aligns with the special issue’s aims to PSMspecialissue@leeds.ac.uk email by 4 April 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be circulated by 5 May 2025, with full length articles to be submitted by 22 September 2025.