Children’s Public Service Media: In Crisis? A Crisis of Childhood?

Conference: MEDIA INDUSTRIES 2024

Dates: 16-19 April 2024

Abstract:

Children’s public service media (PSM) in the UK is at a critical junction. As new ways of reaching child audiences are rapidly emerging and evolving, children are not engaging with ‘traditional’ broadcast media in ways they once did. UK PSM organisations are seeing audiences migrate to new platforms and adopting new consumption practices, with this trend most pronounced for children. Online/social media platforms are significantly more popular with children than television; Ofcom (2023) recently finding that 3-17 year-olds watch far more through YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat than on any other platform (including the BBC’s). Funding models for UK children’s content production have been collapsing and new ones only slowly emerging, with UK PSM organisations unsure how best to operate.

For those children whose families can afford to pay for subscription-based services and quality wi-fi there is no shortage of children’s content. However little of the media that UK children are engaging with has been made explicitly for them. That is to say, content accessible through on-demand services such as Netflix, Prime and Disney+ are, in the main, not produced in the UK, for British children. As a result, children are engaging with an increasing volume of content that does not reflect the everyday realities of their lives; with much of it reflecting a globalised, mainly US-led, vision of childhood. Of the children’s content that is UK produced and available through on-demand services, much is routinely ‘universalised’ to be sold to global audiences. In other words, even when children’s media content is produced in the UK, it can still fail to talk to and reflect UK children’s actual experiences, beliefs and values.

In a time of uncertainty around audience practices, technological change and funding, coupled with a challenging policy landscape, it is timely and vital that we engage in rich interdisciplinary dialogue on the historical and present - as well as encourage considered and critical forward facing responses to the issues outlined.

Source: Manual