You are invited to participate in an all-day symposium on Thursday 10 June chaired by Steve Hewlett, presenter of Radio 4’s The Media Show, and hosted by City University’s Department of Journalism. The symposium embraces the current consultation on the BBC's Strategy Review in asking a broader question: what is the future for pluralism in the supply of public service content in the UK?

Schedule:
10.30 - Coffee and welcome
11.00 - The role of the licence-funded BBC and the significance of the Strategy Review
Panel: Caroline Thomson (Chief Operating Officer, BBC), Professor Steven Barnett, Mark Oliver, Professor Richard Collins
12.30 - Lunch
13.30 - How to identify, supply and fund the PSB needs the BBC cannot fulfil
Panel: Jonathan Thompson (Director of Strategy, Ofcom), Geraint Talfan Davies, Blair Jenkins, Helen Shaw
15.00 - Coffee
15.15 - The public service media content that merits support in the digital future, and how it can be funded
 Panel: Tim Gardam, Tony Curzon Price, Claire Enders, Jeremy Dear (NUJ), Sunny Hundal

The symposium is the physical culmination of the online Public Service Broadcasting Forum, an editorial series and online discussion board. Launched on 29 March by Frank Field MP on the openDemocracy website, the Forum aims to debate the status, health and future of public service broadcasting in parallel with the public consultation period of Putting Quality First, the BBC’s formal Strategy Review.

The PSB Forum has already published dozens of posts – speeches, documents, opinions, research papers, proposals and comments – dealing with current broadcasting matters, all of which are freely available at www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/collections/psbf. It is open to all quality contributions and we hope participants will engage in this online discussion in the run-up to the symposium. Contributions to the Forum will be summarised for participants in the symposium in their email pack ahead of the event.

Reservations can be made at http://psbf.eventbrite.com. An attendance fee of £25 will cover morning and afternoon coffee and a sandwich lunch. There are a small number of student tickets available for £15.

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Whether or not you can participate in person, you are welcome to contribute online with short articles, comments or papers for publication on the website.

Contributions and queries should be sent to the Forum’s moderator, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal at:

[email protected]