Current Projects

RePIM – Revisioning Public Interest Media is a four-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Doctoral Network dedicated to reimagining the role and future of public interest media in a data-driven, platform-dominated environment. RePIM brings together leading European universities, industry partners, and 12 Doctoral Candidates in an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral training and research programme. The network investigates how public interest media can remain relevant, sustainable, and impactful by transforming how content is produced, packaged, distributed, and supported organisationally and technologically. Through its focus on strategic innovation, organisational change, and media management, RePIM equips its doctoral researchers with advanced analytical and managerial skills to help reshape public interest media across diverse European contexts.

Doctoral Project at the Universität Zürich (DC1) – Coping with the challenges of automated content in Public Interest Media
Host institution: Universität Zürich (UZH) — IKMZ, Media & Internet Governance Division
Supervisors: Prof. Natascha Just (UZH) & Prof. Josef Trappel (PLUS)
Academic secondment: Paris Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS)
Industrial secondment: Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT)
PhD duration: 3 years

This project examines how automated and AI-supported content is used in public interest media and what this means for journalistic practice and organisational decision-making. It focuses on four challenge areas: editorial responsibility, legal questions, ethical concerns, and managerial implications for workflows and governance.
In addition, UZH will host a Doctoral Candidate from Paris Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS) for an academic secondment as part of the network’s mobility and training programme.

Academic Consortium 
RePIM is implemented by eight academic institutions with longstanding research excellence in media and communication, digital innovation, and public interest media. Together, they host, supervise, and train the network’s 12 Doctoral Candidates.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium
imec-SMIT research centre – Project Coordinator
Prof. Dr. Tim Raats (Project Coordinator)
Dr. Catalina Iordache (Project Manager)
Prof. Dr. Wendy Van den Broeck
Prof. Dr. Karen Donders

Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark
Department of Electronic Systems – Digital Transformations group
Prof. Dr. Jannick Sørensen
Prof. Dr. Reza Tadayoni

Paris-Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS), Austria
Communication Studies Department
Prof. Dr. Sergio Sparviero
Prof. Dr. Josef Trappel

Charles University (CU), Czechia
Department of Film Studies
Prof. Dr. Petr Szczepanik

University of Stavanger (UiS), Norway
Department of Media and Social Sciences
Prof. Dr. Helle Sjøvaag

University of Warsaw (UW), Poland
Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies
Prof. Dr. Michał Głowacki

Tallinn University (TLU), Estonia
Baltic Film, Media and Arts School
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Rohn

Universität Zürich (UZH), Switzerland
IKMZ, Media & Internet Governance Division
Prof. Dr. Natascha Just

Funding & duration
RePIM is funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks within the EU’s Horizon Europe programme (Grant ID 101227216).

Running time: January 2026 – December 2029.

The ubiquitous adoption of social media has facilitated the distribution of harmful content such as hate speech and disinformation. The reluctance of social media companies to handle harmful content and the lack of transparency in their moderation policies have led to calls for regulation of social media platforms. However, the design and enforcement of social media regulation present critical difficulties for policymakers, including limited access to data, statistics, metrics, and algorithms; lack of tools for predicting the impact and unintended consequences of specific regulations; and diverse contexts of different countries.

The CARISMA project will establish a clear, traceable, and replicable methodology to craft policy recommendations that effectively mitigate the harms of social media actors responsible for abusive and illicit behaviors. Inputs from media policy and governance research will be used to formulate a set of policy alternatives that are expected to produce effective solutions for the mitigation of online harm. Computational social science methodologies will in turn model the effects of moderation policies and quantify their impact.

CARISMA will generate policy recommendations and quantitative evidence to classify regulatory policies and assess their expected impact within the information ecosystem. This will form the basis, for platforms and regulators of any country, to react in a timely fashion to social media misuse by crafting effective and transparent policy interventions.

CARISMA is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation(SNSF) under the Sinergia Funding Scheme.

Applicants:

Silvia Giordano, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland - SUPSI, Thermo-Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Department of Innovative Technologies

Natascha Just, University of Zurich, Department of Communication and Media Research, Media & Internet Governance Division

Filippo Menczer, Indiana University, Luddy School of Informatics, Observatory on Social Media

Running time: January 2023 to December 2026.

Internet platforms increasingly act as intermediaries and gateways to opinion-forming content. Due to their intermediary functions and market power in many areas of importance to social communication, they are ascribed a high potential for influencing and endangering public-opinion formation. This raises new questions about the control of opinion power and media concentration in platform markets.

This project comparatively examines media-concentration and opinion-power control in six countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK, USA, Italy). It gives an overview of selected approaches to the control of market power and opinion power in the communications sector. This shows what strategies and approaches are being pursued in different countries and what political importance is attached to regulating media concentration in times of platformization.

The results are available as downloads (German only).

Final report and executive summary:

Executive summary of final report (PDF, 487 KB)

Final report (PDF, 2 MB)

Interim report and executive summary:

Executive summary of interim report (PDF, 349 KB)

Interim report (PDF, 2 MB)

The report was produced as part of the project «Messung von Meinungsmacht und Vielfalt im Internet: Pilotprojekt zur publizistischen Konzentrationskontrolle», which is funded by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt).

Running time: February 2021 to Februrary 2022.