The third forum for senior managers, the leaders in public regional broadcasting, was held in Stockholm on 16^th June 2017 at the kind invitation of SVT.

The forum theme was "Defining Moment", the quote picked up from a speech by Ms. Hanna Stjärne, CEO of SVT, when she addressed what lay ahead for the SVT staff in the coming three years. Stjärne argues that this is the moment when Public Service Media defines the right to exist in a digital market and, unless PSM does exactly this, it will be marginalized and fade away in a global commercial competition.

During the forum Ms. Stjärne expanded on her thoughts and gave ample examples from recent SVT strategic shifts and activities. The most prominent was the strategy to consider online publication as important and equal to traditional broadcast.

"Many broadcasters and legacy media, including SVT, have claimed to be online first. But this is usually words without real impact on the organization or in the output" said Stjärne. "What we have done is to start over and really change the organization and the output. For instance, we felt it necessary for all employees in the big national news room to seek their jobs all over according to new job descriptions that had a better fit with online as important as broadcast".

The forum also included a tour of a more or less fully digitally automated news room that was able to go live in 30 seconds and had an integrated workflow over online and broadcast platforms. A news cast can easily be hosted and aired by one person - the presenter.

Ms. Anne Lagercrantz, Head of SVT News, explained to the gathered executives from all over Europe, that she had started out in other companies with the notion that journalists should be able to work for all platforms, be it online or broadcast.
"But now I have changed opinion" said Lagercrantz. "In order to actually be able to compete with international online players like AJ+, we need to be extreme experts. Therefore we now have created several different online teams and encourage the difference in production and storytelling in broadcast and online."

Mr. Adde Granberg, SVT CTO, gave a presentation of his plan to adjust the whole company's production and distribution to the new SVT strategy. He shared his so far successful implementation strategy, which showed that the best way to create change is not to train hundreds of staff but to implement new ways of working directly when big events is planned. "We constantly need to change and adapt our ways of working. It is not possible to create artificial training situations because when the training is finished we need to change".

During the forum it became clear that the local and regional news rooms had been a change leader for many years in the company when it came to structure and digital focus. Ms. Christina Ågren, head of Local and Minority news, had in fact led an organisation in constant change with three different CEOs. Ågren presented a complete changeover of the morning local news in broadcast taking place coming Monday - the forum was held on a Friday - without presenters and a graphic appeal similar to online scrolling. "It is a much more rapid experience for the viewer, it integrates with our online offer and it makes it possible to put more efforts in the field and less in the studio" said Ms. Ågren.

Challenges for a "Digital Leader" and challenges brought by the new Digital Ecosystem were also discussed and experiences were shared. Questions that the executives discussed were:

- How do we allocate resources from broadcast to online? What is the currency - money, amount of staff, output?
- What are the tools to switch competences in the news room?
- Which are the key functions to secure in the digital transformation?
- How can we involve the unions as drivers of change?
- How important is it to focus on a unique mobile experience?
- How do you get management from digital, newsroom and commissioners to work together?
- How have you succeed in joining forces when it comes to local news, sports and national news? Any examples of great journalism coming out of the collaboration?
- SVT's strategy is that online is as important as broadcast. How do we define online - our own site or global platforms? What is your company's strategy?
- Online-autonomy or integrated newsrooms. Specialists or generalists? What are your experiences?
- How do you work with KPI:s in your newsroom?
- Platforms do not pay adequate tax in Europe while at the same time eroding the commercial media market by taking over an increasing proportion of the advertising business. Does PSM in today's media environment have a greater responsibility for the media ecosystem than before?
- Publishing of content on the platforms give them a local and national appearance, creates interest and legitimacy for platforms. By attracting an audience to the platforms, we indirectly make users into commodity for sale to advertisers, dodgy institutes, parties and companies whose business we are not aware of.

The full day of digital strategy, automatization, change drivers and impact of global platforms on local and regional media players also included a presentation of very analogue element of the change process. In order to support the necessary cultural change within the company SVT had organized a massive coffee-project inviting all sorts of groups like high-school classes, sports teams, fire men, teachers, families etc. to host a discussion over coffee, tea and cinnamon buns. SVT-staff then came to the groups in teams with the coffee baskets to listen to how the users and audience all over Sweden actually perceived and consumed the SVT journalism. The approximately 100 fieldtrips into the reality of the citizens produced a lot of knowledge and many staff members came home with completely new insights. Not all were positive and the need for change became more imminent.