Consortium meets in Bucharest

On October 4-6, Mediadelcom consortium had the last meeting of that kind in Bucharest, Romania. During the in-person contact event, the country teams had a detailed discussion on topics related to final outcomes of the project. The two books under preparation went through in-depth finalizing debate. Also, validity of conclusions, narrative based scenarios and agent based models were talked through at the meeting. The summary of the meeting has been presented in the podcast episode 44.

Furthermore, the issues of dissemination were addressed, as the final results are to accomplished soon and need to be presented to the public. Some publications have already been launched or at least introduced in Mediadelcom podcasts. Regards the coming publications, please stay tuned on our website.

Photo by June Andrei George on Unsplash

Consortium meets in Warsaw

Mediadelcom country teams meet in Warsaw, Poland, to discuss the results from the fuzzy set and future findings’ dissemination. During the first day of the biannual meeting, the consortium talks about e-book proceedings and preliminary results of comparative fuzzy set analysis. Above that, the also aim to discuss the project’s impact, with on open public event dedicated to deliberate communications in arts, culture and media.

Consortium is fine-tuning the approaches in Sofia

The second semi-annual meeting of Mediadelcom in 2022 takes place in Bulgaria, at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.

At such meetings, the consortium fine-tunes the concepts and variables for the research. This time, the first book details are being addressed, as well as the visions for comparative research among the 14 participating countries. Also, the agent approach and the resultant agent-oriented modelling is getting more focused as a tool.

The consortium is carefully listening to the feedback from the distinguished professors from the Advisory Board, Daniel Hallin and Kaarle Nordenstreng, and will adjust sail based on that.

Also the arrangements for intensified dissemination of the results have started to let the professional, academic and public audiences to get the load of the observations, conclusions and policy recommendations by the Mediadelcom project.

For more listen to the podcast episode 30.

Photo by Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.

Mediadelcom consortium meets in Dubrovnik, Croatia

The Mediadelcom consortium meets this week in Dubrovnik, Croatia to discuss the issues of WP3. This contains the fuzzy set approach in qualitative comparative data analysis, which the consortium is setting up for further research.

Also, the publication plans are under discussion. As to the Grant Application, there will be two books published during the project.

In parallel, the 10^th Graduate Spring School & Research Conference on Comparative Media Systems is running to cover the topics of deliberative communication. This is co-organized with the ECREA CEE Network & Mediadelcom, titled “Media System Characteristics as Risks or Opportunities for Deliberative Communication”.

Mediadelcom’s first year of activities recapped

The first calendar year of the Mediadelcom project under the EU programme H2020 has almost come to its end. The for finding risks and opportunities for European media landscapes was kicked off in March 2021. During the first 10 month of its run, the project teams carried out a number of preparatory tasks. The project’s intended path over all three years can be found in website section Departure Point.

Four domains have been theoretically developed, upon which further research will be based. The domains have been popularly discussed in Podcast episodes 3, 6, 8, 10. The domain theory and variables were tested in pilot studies reported at the consortium meeting in Tallinn, Estonia (listen to Podcast episode 7). The research teams started to write the first reports– country case studies – which were initially drafted by early November 2021. The country case studies are scheduled to be completed in early 2022.

At the same time, the second set of reports will be accomplished – the comparative case studies. The methodology of these comparative studies is to be developed. Furthermore, a comparison of the 14 participating EU countries will be made using the fuzzy set approach (cf. Podcast episode 9). The deliberations by divers consortium members regards to the project’s advancement you can listen to in the Podcast episode 11.

Preparations for the first book under the working title European roads: Different risks and possibilities will start in 2022. Also, the literature database based on country studies will be built up.

MEDIADELCOM kicked off on March, 23

*The Swedish researchers present conceptual variables on journalism. Screen-shot from the Teams plaform display.*

The H2020 project MEDIADELCOM officially started today, as the four-day kick-off meeting started. Several founding aspects were discusses, including the essence of deliberative communication which is what the entire project is all about.

Some of the focus of the project has been introduced in our earlier website posts, both written and oral. We continue to produce our outreach materials on the project activities and brainwork.

The rest of the kick-off meeting will be focused on several aspects and tools (e.g., variables, templates etc.) being addressed in the project, especially upon WP1 – Work Package 1 – but also on dissemination of findings, research ethics, reporting to the EC.

The consortium will hear about the simultaneous EU funded projects in the field of Evolving Media Landscapes and Europeanisation – Mediatized EU and EUMEPLAT. In parallel, the advisory board members and the surveying EC officers will give several addresses to the consortium members.

MEDIADELCOM kick-off meeting is coming on March, 23–26

Takes place on the Teams communication platform.

Kick-off meeting agendaDownload

First podcast episode sheds popular light upon MEDIADELCOM

MEDIADELCOM has released the first podcast episode. It talks about the project’s intentions and goals.

Halliki Harro-Loit, the project coordinator and the professor in journalism of the University of Tartu (Estonia) reveals the main characteristics of MEDIADELCOM, the participating countries and teams, and the theoretical background. The latter is related to four main domains, which as the project’s hypothesis suggests create most of the risks and opportunities to be detected: legal and ethical regulation; media related competencies of both the journalists and the lay public; media usage patterns; and journalism news production.

In the podcast episode, representatives from two of the projects 17 teams express their expectations for the project. Peter Berglez, a professor in media and communication science from the Jönköping University (Sweden) says he hopes the project will produce “very important research about media and journalism development in European context”. On the one hand the consortium will make use of pre-existing multiple research on various aspects of journalism while, on the other hand, it will use the findings to establish understanding of the development of media in the EU from an economic point of view and from the democratic perspective.

Regarding the consortium, Peter Berglez says, “I have very great expectations concerning the network of researchers and scholars this project builds upon. It will also pave the way for a lot of good research in the future.”

Lenka Waschková Císařová, assistent professor from Masaryk University (Brno, CZE) also looks for a common working field for researchers coming from the CEE countries. “I hope that we will finally cooperate in Central and Eastern Europe because I know several colleagues from projects, conferences, papers, and books but we have not had an opportunity to work together. So I am glad that we finally meet in this project.”

“I think that it is a brilliant idea not to collect new data but rather work with the existing data,” Lenka Waschková Císařová adds. She feels, CEE countries have much information about themselves but due to divergence in media systems, policies and even languages, media researchers in the CEE countries do not know much about what has been studied or what kind of knowledge has been accumulated by others.

“The media situation pushes research to focus more on longitudinal understanding of media development in different countries,” Lenka Waschková Císařová says. This is the foundation of the overall context.

Peter Berglez notes that currently “the concept of professional journalism is in many ways questioned. … So what we need to explore under that, is the media development, the relation between the traditional journalism and other types of practices, which somehow represent journalism as well, or the big global platforms and social media.”

The kick-off meeting for the MEDIADELCOM will take place over four days from 23-26 March 2021. The project coordinator explains that as the meeting has to be held online and bring the project’s specifics to everyone’s attention, the duration of each day are planned to be short – 4 hours max.

In the early bird mood, however, two virtual meetings have already taken place – the say-hello-meeting and the work-package 1 meeting. Halliki Harro-Loit expects the next general workshop in September to take place in person.

The website is under construction

The current webpage is under construction. Thus, you may witness some pecularities during the development work. All items on the webpage are subjected to change.

Also we would appreciate, if you let us know about possible errors, shortfalls and suggestions at projectmediadelcom.eu.

The MEDIADELCOM is carried out by 17 teams representing 14 EU countries. The project pays special attention to CEE.

The project starts

Abbreviation DELCOM stands for ‘Deliberative Communication.’

The project MEDIADELCOM is titled Critical Exploration of Media Related Risks and Opportunities for Deliberative Communication: Development Scenarios of the European Media Landscape, which is financed within the EU’s funding programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020. The project is coordinated by the University of Tartu (Estonia) and is to start in March 2021.

The overall objective of MEDIADELCOM is to develop a diagnostic tool (multiple scenario building model) for policy makers, educators, media critical bodies and institutions, as well as for media experts and journalists, which enables the provision of holistic assessment of risks and opportunities concerning deliberative communication and consequently social cohesion in Europe.

The MEDIADELCOM diagnostic tool enables drawing multiple risks and opportunity scenarios of the European media landscape at large, as well as the development of media landscapes in individual countries. Conceptual and operational variables for multiple scenarios will be created by thoroughly examining the diachronic and synchronic changes in news media ecosystems in 14 European countries with special attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).