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Ass.Prof.in Dr.in Cornelia Brantner
Program Structure Analysis of the ORF-Program
The programme analysis of ORF's television programmes, which is carried out annually as part of ORF's quality assurance system, has been carried out by the Institute for Knowledge Communication and Applied Research (IWAF) based in Vienna since 2015. Together with Jürgen Pfeffer, Professor of Computational Social Science & Big Data at the Technical University of Munich, I am responsible for the supervision and management of the project. In the process, the entire ORF programme is categorised according to the four categories of information, entertainment, culture and sport laid down in the core public service mandate pursuant to Section 4 (2) of the ORF Act: In fulfilment of its public service programming mandate, ORF has to offer an overall programme encompassing all four categories and to orientate itself towards the diversity of interests of all users and to take these into account in a balanced manner. The respective shares of the overall programme - this includes the four channels ORF 1, ORF 2, ORF III and ORF SPORT+ - have to be in an appropriate ratio to each other.
In order to ensure the programme mandate, ORF is legally obliged to carry out an annual programme structure analysis. IWAF was awarded the corresponding contract in 2015 on the basis of a public tender. The categorisation of the entire ORF television programme, briefly explained below, is carried out on the basis of a category system developed at the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies and corresponds to the expert opinion by Haas, Brantner and Herczeg from 2013.
The team of coders assigns the individual ORF programmes to programme categories. These fine categories range from 100 "News", to 421 "Culture Magazine", 515 "Children's Film", to 996 "Animation Series". The coding is done in a Filemaker database. This contains meta-information for all individual programmes broadcast on all four channels in the corresponding year, such as channel, date, start/end time, duration, and title of the programme. The ORF's own coding of the fine categories, ORF Teleplan and the ORF websites provide the coders with information about the respective programme content; if there is any ambiguity, the programmes are inspected. The codebook developed for the content analysis provides instructions and numerous anchor examples that facilitate the assignment to the correct fine category.
In principle, the programmes are classified according to the focus of the respective programme format. In order to meet scientific quality standards and to guarantee the validity and reliability of the coding, the coders are trained accordingly, which ends with an intercoder reliability test. This should guarantee the validity and reliability of the coding.
Furthermore, within the framework of project supervision, the assignments made are randomly checked during and after completion of the coding. These programme categories are then each grouped into one of the four coarse categories mentioned. Such an assignment to only one category is partly associated with limitations, as several assignments could be argued for some fine categories. This is due to the fact that there are overlaps between entertainment and information, between information and culture or between entertainment and culture, for example, in hybrid formats or the daily coverage of cultural or sports topics in news programmes.
However, the division of the programme categories into the four coarse categories of information, entertainment, culture and sport is basically done according to which of the four categories is the main focus in the fine category. For example, according to the code book, the categories "173 National Folk Culture/Lore" and "225 Folk Group Programmes" are assigned to the broad category of culture, since programmes classified in these categories correspond to a contemporary concept of culture.
The final evaluation is carried out for all four broadcasters - individually and together - for the entire reporting year. The percentage share of the respective categories in the overall programme is reported in seconds. The results serve as proof of the fulfilment of the programme mandate and are included in the ORF annual report.
