Baltic Media Resilience Forum
The media ecosystems (including social media) in the Baltic/Ukrainian region are facing a growing number of overlapping crises: climate change, foreign malign information and cognitive warfare, AI deepfake, a brutal drop in advertising revenues, disintermediation by Big Tech, resulting in disengagement by audiences.
In this context, the question is no longer how well local media ecosystems can face disruption to maintain business-as-usual, but rather how they can respond in ways that make them and the communities they serve more resilient, strengthening long-term resilience . Rather than treating each crisis as an isolated event, this initiative explores how local media and the communities they serve can navigate complex, long- term development trajectories in times of uncertainty.
Conventional approaches to resilience often focus on the ability of regions to absorb shocks and return to a previous state. This initiative applies an evolutionary interpretation of resilience that embraces change and transformation, inspired by the Nordregio program Espon Terres.
Insights from Nordregio’s case studies underline the importance of involving local communities early in the design of resilience strategies. Because, even if resilience is mostly discussed at EU or national levels, its success depends heavily on engagement in local communities. And in this context, local media ecosystems play a crucial role.
The project partners have engaged with both security and climate media experts in the process of finding solutions. In February, the partners joined at SSE Riga Media Centre and during three intense days we developed a structure and a road map for a possible way forward.
The end result of this seed project, just like the Nordic Media Resilience Forum, is to formulate a joint action plan for at resilient Nordic Media Ecosystem. Possibly, these two initiatives can merge into one Nordic/Baltic/Ukrainian Forum.
Financed by