Public Service framtid i de ungas händer : En kvalitativ studie om gymnasieelevers användande av och åsikter om svensk public service.

Sammanfattning: Public service media has a big role in the traditional media in Sweden. Historically, they constructed a shared cultural reference and applied news and facts to people to make it possible for them to be educated citizens. However, public service and other traditional media have a difficulty reaching young people today. At the same time young people are the group that consumes the most amount of media. Therefore, it is relevant to study what they consume and what they discard - and why. Especially why they don’t consume the content provided by Swedish public service media. Because if they don’t consume it now, will they in the future?       This qualitative study aims to examine how young people in Sweden use public service media and whether they value it as a public service. To do this, we conducted four focus groups with a total of twelve 18-year-olds. The result shows that even though few of them choose to consume content from the public service media, most of them have a positive association of it and value it as a public service. Many said that they trust that they follow their assignment to serve the public and that they produce objective and accurate news. However, the knowledge about the way public service media is organized and financed was shallow at best. It appears that the main reason they don’t consume the content is that they don’t come across it where they consume media. The interviewees that did consume public service media content did so on a different platform such as Spotify or YouTube. So the difficulty in reaching the young audience might not be because of the content, but that they don’t even know of its existence.