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“Quality Management in media corporations :

new requirements and benefits”

Abstract : media corporations, unlike any other company, have to satisfy two kinds of customers with potentially contradictory expectations : audience/readership and advertisers. Some of them even have to satisfy governmental expectations and/or requirements which add another layer of complexity in the production of contents. Those of them which aim at providing news to the general public are constantly threatened by biased editorial production due to the number and complexity of interactions with their stakeholders. Some key aspects of topicality necessary to forge public opinion may be simply hidden for untold reasons. Consequently, in order to help media corporations achieve editorial independence while serving the public interest, media professionals from all over the world have brought together their management know-how in a set of duly selected media specific requirements gathered in the so called ISAS MEDIA9001 standard, entirely based on ISO 9001. These requirements stand for the current best management practices so as to not only produce high quality news but also ensure long term sustainability of the media while aiming at serving the public interest.

Key words : media management, newsroom, editorial independence, public interest, freedom of expression, censorship, quality management, risk, stakeholders, ISO 9001, ISAS MEDIA 9001.

Media trust crisis: a key stake in every rich, « democratic » and large country The Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index [RWB2015] ranks the performance of 180 countries according to a range of criteria that include media pluralism and independence, respect for the safety and freedom of journalists, and the legislative, institutional and infrastructural environment in which the media operate. Their last reports show an increasing stall of the freedom of speech in some of the largest and richest countries (e.g. USA, France, UK, Japan rank in the 38th place or higher, long after the best in class smaller countries like Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland or even Costa Rica which all fall before the 20th place). In the meantime, the latest Edelman Trust barometer [EDEL2016] shows that the media keep laying in the third place regarding their public trust after NGO, businesses and before governments. This shows how huge the stake of media trust is to ensure relevant, accurate and transparent news selection and reporting. One can therefore wonder the kind of role the media play in these so-called large democratic countries.

Figure 1 : 2015 World Freedom Press Index, Reporters without boarders

Evaluation criteria : - number of journalists, media workers imprisoned and/or killed while on duty, - number of journalists kidnapped and journalists in exile, - number of attacks and arrests, - number of media censored over the given period - self-censorship affecting information producers - political interference in the editorial content - transparency of government schemes - economic concentration, - favoritism in awarding grants and allocation of public advertising. - discrimination in access to professions in the media sector and journalism training

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Media key roles in Society The media supplement published by the Global Reporting Initiative in 2012 [GRI2012] nonetheless suggests media companies should play key roles in Society as shown in figure 2. The GRI media Sector Supplement has been created to assist media organizations in clearly articulating their role in supporting progress towards a sustainable society and to develop ways to measure and improve their performance.

Figure 2 : media key roles in society, Global Reporting Initiative, 2012

Though most, if not all, media companies state they fully agree or strive for playing fairly these key roles, it is often shown that this is not always possible due to the complex nature of the interactions with their key stakeholders.

Media operation : a complex environment with many potential vulnerabilities and threats

One key reason for which media corporations cannot ensure editorial independence deals with the fact that they operate in a complex environment likely to impact either directly or indirectly its editorial independence as shown in figure 2.

Figure 3 : : Interactions of the media industry with its environment, ISAS MEDIA9001

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Newsrooms are exposed to an array of influences likely to impair the trust in the news they make. From political or self-censorship to full advertisement-based funding with potential bias in the way to process advertisers’ related topics or budget constraints arbitrarily decided by parliament deputies who sometimes have shares in other media, non-neutral sources of pressure are numerous and may affect directly the impartial selection and reporting of news, thereby hiding some key aspects of topicality necessary to forge the public opinion.

Quality management systems : a necessary but insufficient condition to ensure media key roles in Society

The added value of Quality management is diversely perceived across the industry sectors. For many years, it has been the cornerstone of life critical businesses in, e.g., the aerospace, microelectronics, medical devices or car manufacturing industries. The lessons learnt from these industrial sectors has largely contributed to develop state of the art quality management practices which resulted in a significant drop of product defects. Those industrial sectors all adopted the backbone of the ISO 9001 standard with specific additional requirements : EN 9100 for the aerospace industry, ISO /TS 16949 for car manufacturing and ISO 13485 for medical devices. To illustrate the benefits of good quality management, since 1959, the annual accident rate per million departures has dropped from 40 to 0.5 [BOE2014]. No doubt that this experience could have inspired other non life critical sectors in such a

way that the whole economy could benefit from quality management. It is rather surprising to observe that not only these well proven quality management practices did not disseminate entirely across other non life critical industries, but some of them have been reluctant to actually implement them with a real focus on their customers: there are many examples amongst banks, real estate, insurance & media companies, telecommunications operators and railway companies that would benefit a lot from actual customer focused management practices [BAL2015].

Figure 4 : Comparison of global ad spending vs ISO 9001 certified companies per industrial sector

As any management systems standard, ISO 9001, the well known quality management requirements dedicated to making the customer satisfied in any field of activity, requires to write what the company

must do to achieve its objectives. It then has to ensure that things are done right and keep evidences of good corporate operation. The overall performance evaluation, based on key performance indicators monitoring, non-conformance management and internal auditing is then supposed to help the top management make fact-based decisions to ensure the best quality to cost ratio of the sold products and/or services. This simple management principle is currently applied worldwide

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Figure 5 : fundamentals of any corporate quality management system

by over 1’138’000 certified companies in any field of activity, including media corporations (e.g. Deutsche Welle). More specifically, it can be applied by any media corporation, regardless of its efforts to defend its editorial independence and without any consideration of the public interest. For instance, commercial musical radio stations can therefore be ISO 9001 certified as long as they show a good capture of their audience and advertisers expectations. Nonetheless, though the economic requirements are satisfied to ensure long term sustainability of the company, there might be large gaps in the editorial independence and/or no effort to serve the public interest.

ISAS MEDIA 9001 : the quality management system dedicated to the media industry

To cope with this key issue, media professionals from all over the world have brought together their management know-how in a set of duly selected media specific requirements gathered in the so called ISAS MEDIA9001 standard. These requirements stand for the current best management practices so as to not only produce high quality news but also ensure long term sustainability of the media keeping in mind the unique aim of serving the public interest. The ISAS MEDIA9001 standard is entirely based on ISO 9001 and completes the set of quality management requirements for corporations willing to show evidences of what they say at all levels with a constant focus on serving the public interest.

Applied to the media industry willing to serve the public interest, quality management requires to write what the media must do to achieve editorial independence while serving the public interest and to target its audience/readership and its advertisers. It then has to ensure that things are done right, e.g. from long term editorial planning to post-broadcast/post publication quality control through externally provided contents producing while respecting the allocated budget. As in ISO 9001, the overall performance evaluation, based on key performance indicators monitoring including, e.g., studies of impact of selected contents on the public or specific segments of the public, non-conformance management and internal auditing should help the top management make fact-based decisions to ensure the best quality to cost ratio of the produced media contents. Core values of a media organization according to ISAS MEDIA 9001:

• A clear mission and editorial viewpoint for each publishing or broadcasting platform within the organization; • High quality information and other contents; • Accurate reporting of facts; • Confidentiality of information sources; • Distinction between opinion and fact; • Separation of advertising and editorial content*; • Widely publicized guidelines on ethics; • Effective mechanisms for identifying and correcting errors; • Responsiveness to feedback from consumers (readers/ listeners/ viewers/ advertiser) as well as other stakeholders; • High-quality training and evaluation of staff; • A risk-based thinking able to mitigate the effects of uncertainties and threats which are particularly pregnant in a media

organization. Source : ISAS MEDIA9001 standard

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Figure 6 : ISO 9001:2015 / ISAS MEDIA 9001:2016 requirements overview

Actual and potential benefits of ISAS MEDIA 9001 for the media industry

The media industry has gone through a deep review of its business model as a consequence of the massive digitization of its processes and shift of internet multiplatform consumption habits: many suffer from the fierce competition of new comers in the internet media but only a few found out that customer focused management system was a key way out of the crisis, by a continuous tuning of the media contents to perfectly match the expectations of both the advertisers and media consumers [MED2014]. With the opening of the Romanian television market, the Romanian public television lost 90% of its market share in only a few years. The parliament subsequently required significant changes and/or cost cutting so as to justify a budget that largely exceeded the quality and quantity of TV programs. Eventually, 30% of the staff was dismissed in 2012. Thai PBS is the first and unique public service broadcaster in Thailand. Thai PBS came to existence in January 2008, at the outset of Thailand’s worst political conflict. The ensuing crisis has proven why public broadcasting service is needed in the first place. Since then, Thai PBS has brought social and cultural perspectives to the daily lives of Thai people through its diverse news, educational and entertainment programs. With its unwavering editorial stand and professionalism, Thai PBS has been able to report on the conflicts independently and reflect the views of all sides involved without bias. In the process, Thai PBS has contributed to promoting and informed citizenry at a time when political polarization threatened to tear apart the society. In 2011, Thai PBS top management decided to go even farther by having its management system certified against the best international management practices.

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Finally, with the advent of Digital Audio Broadcasting, a whole new range of programs and services are now available on air. It is expected that the market dilution incurred by this new technology will surely impact local and regional radio stations, threatened by remotely produced programs henceforth available in their historical broadcasting area. To ensure their long term sustainability, small private radio stations in French speaking Switzerland decided to have their management systems certified according to media specific quality management requirements [ISAS2016] so as to ensure, among other things, that the audience expectations are captured and managed to continuously tune the program contents accordingly. The management of these radio stations is convinced that quality management is a key way to differentiate their programs from remotely produced programs with no focus on local life. Conclusion : ISAS MEDIA9001, a must for any media corporation making news of public interest In conclusion, the ISO 9001, with nearly 30 years of existence, provides a well proven management tool which is both simple and concrete, resulting in many benefits, provided that its seven core principles are strictly implemented. Media companies can also adopt it as a tool to strengthen their sustainability in an open market so as to cope effectively with the competition while maximizing their brand value. For media corporations willing to go beyond and make news dedicated to the general public, ISAS MEDIA 9001 is the perfect complement to ISO 9001 with media specific requirements to show evidences of editorial independence with a focus on serving the public interest. The 3rd party certification provides the perfect way to be recognized as such. Media companies interested in retrieving the benefits of certified management systems must clearly identify their own ecosystem, i.e. who their key stakeholders are and which objectives they aim with each of them so as to inventory any risk associated to them, especially those likely to jeopardize their editorial independence. The management system then requires to describe how these objectives can be achieved, how the risks are treated and check practically whether the steps taken to deliver the added value are efficient or not. Integrated management system softwares provide a great help to describe and optimize the operations [CLICK2015]. As Guillaume Chenevière, former managing director of the Swiss French speaking national television, states : « the main asset of a public service media is the public trust in its added value to society. The ISAS MEDIA 9001 media quality management system has no other intent than to help media corporations set up a more transparent organization and a more efficient system of quality control, indispensable tools to this goal. »

Some testimonials from certified media corporations : “ISAS MEDIA9001 : a wonderful tool to solve problems and prevent conflicts”, Chairul Tanjun, CEO of TRANS TV Jakarta, 1st commercial TV channel in Indonesia, 2009. “Facilitate the transition towards a modern and high quality public service radio”, Andras Istvan Demeter, President Director General Radio Romania, February 2011. “Written know-how ensures sustainability of the media. We shall never do without again”,Florian Jeanneret, Managing Director, Radio Chablais, CH, July 2015. « Our quality management system provides us with a key lever to take up the challenges of public service broadcasting », Anothai Udomsilp, Director, Thai PBS Academic Institute of public media, November 2015. « ISAS MEDIA9001 facilitates our conformance with new laws on Radio and TV », Francisco Gonzalez, Quality Manager, Canal Once, Mexico, July 2015.

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M. Eng. David Balme

David owns a M. Eng. in mechanical engineering from Université Joseph Fourier and McGill University and a M. Eng. in telecommunication systems from Telecom Paris’Tech. He started his career as a training inspector for SGS in Mexico. He was then a teaching assistant at McGill University and joined Texas Instruments in 2000 as a telecommunication systems engineer where he spent 7 years developing the 3G baseband modem and new System on a Chip designs for the mobile phone market. For the last 11 years, he has been the CEO of Challenge

Optimum SA, the Swiss French speaking private leader in consulting, training and software expertise in quality management. Challenge Optimum SA aims at maximizing the value of the products/services and the efficiency of corporate organizations, worldwide, in any field of activity. Its clients are both local and global in watch making, food industry, media, real-estate, pharmaceutical industry, security inspection, testing and certification services. Its know-how is embedded in a software dedicated to describe and optimize organizational performance called Click-N-Manage.

References

[BAL2015] ISO 9001:2015 : a key lever to take up the challenges of deregulated markets, change of consumption habits and make the best use of technological breakthroughs, Quality Assurance, September 2015.

[BOE2014] Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents, Worldwide operations 1959-2013. Aviation Safety, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, August 2014.

[CLICK2015] Click-N-Manage software www.Click-N-Manage.com [EDEL2016] Edelman Trust Barometer http://www.edelman.com/insights/intellectual-property/2016-edelman-trust-barometer/ [GRI2012] Global Reporting Initiative sector guidance for the media industry (media Supplement) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/sector-guidance/sector-guidance/media/Pages/default.aspx

[ISAS2016] ISAS MEDIA9001:2016 – A quality management standard dedicated to media industries (radio, TV, print media, Internet), http://www.media-society.org/en/isas-BCP-9001-standard

[ISAS2010] ISAS BCP9001:2010 - A quality management standard dedicated to media industries (radio, TV, print media, Internet), http://www.media-society.org/en/isas-BCP-9001-standard

[ISO9001] ISO survey 2014 http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_survey_executive-summary.pdf?v2014

[MED2014] Newspapers Turning Ideas into Dollars, Four Revenue Success Stories Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2013, www.journalism.org [RWB2015] Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, 2015 http://index.rsf.org/#!/