This article investigates the conditions for making online youth fiction in a public service context at a time when young people increasingly are abandoning both legacy mass media and linear flow television to consume and share content online. The article’s starting point is the production of online youth fiction in two Nordic public service institutions, the Norwegian NRK and the Danish DR, and it discusses how digitisation and new competitors present both challenges and opportunities for institutions such as these. Furthermore, the article discusses the organisation of online youth fiction in both institutions and investigates how organisational strategies and production cultures come into play in each of these broadcasters’ early signature youth series: the widely popular online teen drama SKAM (NRK, 2015-2017) and the far less known youth series Anton 90 (DR, 2015). Our findings show that it was the pressure imposed by digitisation and new competitors that led these institutions to take new risks with their youth fiction production, changing their production patterns to make short-form drama series tailored to online streaming, and ultimately treating online youth fiction as a distinctly different task than “regular” fiction.
This article investigates the kinds of evaluative practices that are employed when gatekeepers in TV want to maximise creativity. By analysing the evaluative regimes used in TV idea development, the analysis points to how a simplicity regime is used in the observed idea development sessions, with ideas being judged constantly as to whether they are clear and simple enough. Using observations, interviews and briefs as data sources, the article concludes that the desire of gatekeeping editors to maximise creativity can place significant pressure on developers who find it difficult to live up to these desires. In addition, the findings suggest that these developers primarily develop ideas for their immediate gatekeeping editors and that the TV viewers are not considered as equally important in their idea development process.
Denne artikel foretager en todelt analyse af DR3’s udvikling i de seneste fem år og finder store forskelle på, hvilke DR3-programmer og genrer der dominerer seertallene på henholdsvis flow-tv og streaming: Sport, store musikevents og et spinoffprogram er blandt de mest sete på flowkanalen, mens fiktion (primært SKAM) dominerer streamingtallene. Dette understreger vanskelighederne i, hvad artiklen kalder den todelte distributionsstrategi og i at skulle producere til to forskellige platforme og seerskarer, som kan have meget forskellige genrepræferencer, og at det næsten er som at skulle administrere to forskellige tv-kanaler på én gang. Artiklens kvalitative bidrag viser to strømninger i kanalens mange faktaprogrammer – henholdsvis de journalistiske eksperimenter og de intime dokumentariske portrætter – der skal understøtte DR3-brandets kerneværdier om hudløs ærlighed, eksperimenter på egen krop og absurditeter i samfundet. Sammenholdt med kanalens nyere fiktionsstrategi peger konklusionen på en kanal, der kan have potentialet til at være en sandkassekanal for DR ved at afprøve nye programkoncepter og tidsformater. Artiklen bidrager ligeledes med en diskussion af problemerne i Seerundersøgelsens metode, som tegner et billede af to inkompatible måleparadigmer, og den diskuterer uforeneligheden mellem flow og streaming i både målemetoder og kanalbranding.
This article presents findings from a production analysis of the Danish public-service television channel DR3’s fiction production Anton 90, which was made in cooperation with a small independent production company called New Creations. In the context of intensified competition on the Danish market for fiction series, the ambivalent cooperation behind this production exemplifies the low-budget efforts of a traditional public service institution to produce the fiction series that their younger target audience desires. The article uses a narrative-discursive approach to creativity and develops the term creative assumptions in order to analyse how media professionals’ implicit assumptions about conditions for creativity can influence the production process, and can generate disagreements. The analysis shows that the value of Anton 90 as a product is negotiated socially by the involved parties who have quite different assumptions about how production conditions can promote creativity, and suggests that a low-budget production can still be labelled as “successful”.
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