PRIX EUROPA

It’s Friday, the last day of presentations in the Emerging Media category of the Prix Europa. Tomorrow we will know who the winner is but for now here’s a few words on each shortlisted entry shown today today.

Obesity is not a sexy topic but the interactive documentary The Big Issue has all the French good taste that the country is known for. It’s so refined in fact, that some jury members wondered whether fat kids would appreciate it. But then, French people big or small are probably more sophisticated than we could ever imagine.

Germany’s News site for children Minitz has avatars who read the daily news for kids on TV. And as a child reporter, you can upload your own story and your avatar of choice will read your news out loud thanks to a voice recognition system. It hasn’t quite taken off in turns of user entries, possibly because the radio producers who write the scripts haven’t yet experimented with calls to action, but it’s definitely got the potential to go big.

The BBC’s majestic Britain from Above beat us into submission with its epic music, cinematic pictures and innovative geo-tagging graphics. It’s refreshing to see people with online backgrounds filtering through the ranks and becoming TV big shots, and on this project it shows. It’s definitely more than a TV programme support site with lots of video content specially shot for the web, great usability and cross linking: the Huffington post even embedded one of these on the famous blog. But whether it’s enough for it to 'emerge' in the world of new media is a different story.

The Swiss public service answer to the X Factor, complete with uploaded user castings, Karaoke game and mixing desk, is Music Star. The number of people accessing the site and uploading entries has been phenomenal in the context of Switzerland. It does sadden me to think such good sites are often, like the TV programmes they support, seasonal only. Producers are saying they will try to save some bits though...

Pasaku is the winner of the ‘heart prize’ – a pet cow with a heart necklace, given by popular vote at the end of the day. It’s a Latvian fairy tale site that tells the stories of old women drowned by rogue clouds. Designed to beat those long Latvian winters, it enables children and parents to listen to fairy tales, find local folk tales on a map, draw and upload pictures and much more. I just wish I spoke Latvian.

The beautifully exectued ED*IT proves the ongoing Dutch public service commitment to unlocking vast archives - kept in the fantastic Sound and Vision building - and encouraging students to mash them up. Schools need to pay a small price to use it but the advantages are obvious, as it enables students to build rich media essays on pretty much whatever subject their teachers choose. It’s a shame that the archives aren’t for download or enabled for uses outside education, but any step in this direction is great.

Since the digital revolution, public service boradcasters live in fear of the wrath of music industry casualties and are therefore treading softly when it comes to creating content around music. Not so for the Finnish YLE who have decided to embrace the music and involve their audience in suggesting what their role in this jagged landscape should be. Following a high profile event and lots of discussions on social media, they have come up with smaller projects that rely on social media and encourage their journalists to engage with music communities. Very refreshing.

Landmark TV series Die Deutschen was watched by millions of viewers online too. What makes it a mammoth offering is that each episode was cut down to various lengths to enable users to pick the level of immersion that pleased them. The discussion that dominated in the jury was whether the series should have covered World War Two which it currently doesn't, which was interesting if perhaps not so useful without the commissioning editors present. Slight shame that the UGC offering that enabled users to upload their stories and put them on Google maps was restricted to schools.

Citizen journalism is at the very core of the Dutch project Metropolis. The wealth of global stories that are at times commissioned and other times suggested by fifty young filmmakers across the world, is incredible. They get paid a couple of hundred euros if their report is used. The result is a navigable map that tells untold stories, from a Tuscan fortess that happens to be a prison, life as a Peruvian thief and how the authorities in Guatemala deal with drunkenness. Something I imagine would be pretty hard to do outside of the particularly liberal Dutch public service, so I’m even more jealous.

Many countries struggle for the survival of their online public service remit: these few days in Berlin have really shown how great the value of this remit is.

Silvia Costeloe (BBC News)