Shaping convergence with "coopetition"

There are still surprises in life, sometimes even two: in the summer, Hanspeter Lebrument took a swing at us communication scientists and terrified us: "The inferior guard of those called to science" had "conquered the field of media and communication". Their work is useless, "characterized by a lack of systematics, questionable research and highly questionable training criteria as well as results that are difficult to understand", he wrote in his association magazine Flash extra on the subject of the "perennial issue of quality".

A few months later came the volte face: Lebrument's association invited four "renowned media scientists" (in the words of the Swiss Media Association) to a hearing in Zurich to "think about possible solutions to the conflict between the SRG and private publishers in the online market from their point of view".

The second surprise came at the hearing itself. Without any prior consultation, the four invited experts came to very similar conclusions. Roger Blum, Heinz Bonfadelli, Kurt Imhof - who had taken an additional beating from the publishers shortly beforehand for his yearbook "Qualität der Medien " - and I recommended that the publishers sit down at a table with the SRG and think together about how they can shape the convergent media future to their mutual advantage. Instead of fighting over the peanuts that will be generated by future online advertising, and instead of waging war in terms of online presence, they should strive to preserve journalistic diversity and ensure the best possible service for Swiss media users with limited resources that are likely to become even scarcer. The future of the media is online, where the old media of TV, radio and print are converging.

Anyone who wants to continue to have a "public service" in times when commercial media are less and less able to fulfill their public task due to falling advertising revenues, the public's declining willingness to pay and shrinking editorial teams should be careful with demands for SRG to restrict itself on the Internet.

In any case, media diversity in Switzerland is more likely to be threatened from outside, i.e. from heavyweights such as Google, Apple and Facebook, but also from large European media companies such as Bertelsmann/RTL, Springer and Mediaset/Mondadori - as well as from the largest private Swiss player Tamedia - than from the SRG.

It is worth thinking ahead in the Internet world and exploring possible synergies if high quality journalism and "Swissness" are to be preserved. "Coopetition" is the keyword. We could learn from the software companies in California how cooperation between competitors can be organized - for example, by allowing competitors who become cooperation partners to strengthen what they already do best: SRG could also provide moving images and podcasts for publishers' websites - as well as foreign, science and media reporting, in other words making more widely available everything that we have already paid for with our license fee money and which many newspaper publishers either cannot do at all or have already greatly reduced. In turn, newspaper publishers could also contribute texts to SRG's online platform in return for appropriate remuneration and play to their strengths in regional and local reporting, where they have always been the news suppliers of the major news agencies anyway. Advertising revenues for online offerings - this is and will probably remain a side issue, because news websites will only generate low advertising revenues anyway.

Anyone who has recently had the opportunity to listen to SRG Director General Roger de Weck or the head of RSI in Ticino, Dino Balestra, will attest to their thoughtfulness, which many publishers still lack. De Weck comes from the press, he was editor-in-chief of the Tages-Anzeiger and Die Zeit. With him as a discussion partner, publishers should be able to actively shape the future of media in Switzerland. To do this, however, they will first have to give up a few prejudiced positions - and perhaps also teach their great chairman that scientific advice is not completely useless, and can sometimes even be groundbreaking.