Cilla Benkö's keynote speech at VISION2020 Trends Conference

Well thank you very much. I'm very honored to be here. As some of you know, I'm not a futurist, I'm just a humble Director General for a public service company, and I'm going to talk to you a bit about the reality of today. I was planning on... because I think we got a lot of interesting information here today. And the tricky thing is, you have to figure out what you want to use of today when you go home, and you have to decide what kind of changes you want to do in your company out of the circumstances you have. But let us not kid ourselves, change is not about throwing away everything we do good today. But we have to look into the future because public service broadcasters in Europe are under a lot of pressure.

How many of you recognize this? You have a severe headache most of the days because of political pressure at home or political uncertainty. Hands up? Can't see some hands up. Yes, most. How many recognize this? Lack of money, financial pressure. Some hands I do see. So as you can see, some of us have political pressure at home, some of us have financial troubles at home, and some of us unfortunately have both. And that is the key for why we need to do changes, why we have to be on top of the agenda. We have to take charge of our own future, otherwise other people will do it for us.

And the key for public service broadcasters in Europe is trust. Because if you do have trust from the audience, then it's harder for people who want to harm you to actually succeed. There is not one single recipe how to create trust, and I can't tell you how to do it. But I will tell you a story and hope that by listening to this story, you can.

This is my company, Swedish Radio, some years ago. This is the situation we were facing. Trust was definitely not at the top. Our Director General was fired, and with him went most of the management team. The audience figures decreasing. Economic crisis. Financial situation: my company, we didn't even have money to finance the next year's full schedule in our channels. And if you asked the audience, they thought we were trustworthy, okay, they thought we were independent, but they perceived us as very, very boring. You cannot have a fun situation. What do you do? Well, we had a change of management, and the first thing we had to do was set some priorities. They were quite rough. 150 people, that's 10% of the workforce, they had to go, they had to leave the company, and they were not replaced. So the people that were left had to do more because also we had the digital shift. So then we said this is the key in our cooperation, cooperation in my company. And why is this important? Because the enemy is not inside the company, the enemy is outside the company. We actually said to our managers that if you cannot cooperate, then you cannot be a manager any longer at the Swedish Radio. We also said that if you can come up with an idea of cooperation that would lead to better content for the future, and you achieve this by working together with others from another department or other editorial room, we will give you some extra money to get you started. So people came up with all kinds of ideas that were really good and that really changed our content. You have to have money for cooperation. Everybody within Swedish Radio knows that this is the key, and they buy into it.

We had to set some new journalistic priorities. We had to change how we worked to reach young people, and we also wanted to change the mindset of our journalists, how we did the journalistic work. Let's start with the journalistic priorities. For us, coming from a small country, foreign coverage is a high priority, basically foreign correspondence. Another priority is cultural content. And then is investigative journalism. But that is the wrong move, believe me. If you do that, you don't have anything that sticks out. Then you will be a provider like everybody else on the media market. So if you are a public service broadcaster, you have to set the agenda, you have to stick to your true journalistic work, and that is investigative journalism. Swedish Radio had a story called Saudi Gate. It was a Swedish plan how to help Saudi Arabia build an advanced weapon factory in the desert that nobody knew about. Quite a good story. It took eight months to do, three reporters, quite expensive story. It created 5,400 articles in other Swedish media. Our story also created stories in big media in Europe, in the Middle East, in the US, and it created trust for Swedish Radio. But it also boosted the morale among the personnel because these people that did this got a lot of awards, and this is good for the inside morale, especially if you are saving money. And the defense minister had to resign, not to forget.

Once you have set priorities for the content, you also have to think about how you will reach your audience. Some of you have heard me say this before. I think we as public service broadcasters have been quite snobbish. We have said that either you have to come to us and listen to us on FM, if a radio company like me, or at least you have to come to our website. In 2010 we changed this strategy. We said that our mission is not to get the audience to come to us, but to bring the content to the audience. And this is a big change for being a public service company, at least in Sweden. We have to get the conversation. One way of doing this is by this little small black embedded player that you can see behind me. It can be placed on any website, a commercial website, the tabloids, the unions, a private person, anybody can use it, and within this little player they can embed an entire radio program. And we have fairly good relations with the newspapers because they can use all our content on their websites, reaching audiences that would normally not listen to us.

And the third thing, once you have set your priority for the content, you know how you want to reach your audience, mindset. Journalist 1.0 is a traditional journalist, the one I have been all my life: you go out, you do a story, you publish it, you have an editor in chief, and best of all someone can comment on it afterwards. Journalist 2.0 is basic media literacy, the journalist does have... after the editor, no pay. Journalist 3.0 is combining these two: traditional journalist working together with the audience already before they start to produce their story, not afterwards, before, and they use the knowledge of the audience, the enthusiasm of the audience.

Then a real role within the democratic society, and I will give a fresh example. Sweden had a debate for weeks about whether to use the N-word... being racist... taking editorial pages of our newspapers, middle-aged people. And then we have an urban radio station called Metropol. They decided, well, let's turn the question around, let's go out and ask the people who are actually affected by these words how it felt. And even though we are a radio company, they did a little video and they placed it on YouTube, and on Twitter, on Facebook, and it exploded. The video shows people saying things like, "It feels like traveling back in time. You have to be prepared for the cold. You think that once upon a time... is that what they actually said? At the gym, during breaks at school, at a meeting, you come down to the arena and you say what you mean, it may sound like you are Swedish, not immigrant..." And together with this video they produced a hashtag on Twitter, and they got stories telling how it felt to be the target of a racist remark on the beach, in school, in the store, on the bus. And that produced radio programs for an entire week, it filled up the channel, but it also turned the entire debate around in Sweden. We played a very vital role as a public service company in a democratic society. We used journalist 3.0 and also trust among the Swedish public. It showed that Swedish Radio existed. We also got a new set of audiences. This is a good example on why it is important to include the ones that you are actually trying to cover when you do your coverage.

Because go to the audience, don't sit and wait for them to come to you. And make sure that you make a difference within the democratic society. And if you do have a successful attitude at home, this is... to avoid crisis. So, if you have a crisis, it could help in the process, especially internally because it's easier to motivate people why they have to change. But even if you don't have a crisis, you should do this constantly: look forward, look ahead, keep what you think is good, but do the necessary changes, do the transformation, because this is the key how to avoid a future crisis. And this is Swedish Radio today. It looks not as grim. The audience is definitely back. We have 5 million listeners every day, which is sort of more than half the population, and it's stable in all our channels. The finances are in fairly good shape. I would say we only have to save 50 million Swedish kronor this year. I would say that is tip top. And the trust is back. We are the most trusted company in all categories, not media, all categories in Sweden by population. Swedish Radio is, and as such, it's a very important news source. And if you are a public service company, this is extremely important. And as far as I know... but my message to you is really take advantage of what you heard today. Go back, think about what you do good that you should keep, think about the necessary changes that you need to do, and do them. Don't sit and wait, because we can't wait. Otherwise other people will take charge of our future. And good luck.