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It is our great pleasure to present this special issue of VIEW Journal of European Television and Culture in honour of Sonja de Leeuw, one of the founding members of the journal. The issue brings together articles that honour Sonja’s inspiring contributions to television history and television historiography.

In 2014, British Pathé launched its YouTube channel with more than 85,000 items of audiovisual heritage from the 20th century. This article analyses the curational strategies of this channel as developed by the German multi-channel network Mediakraft in consideration of YouTube’s algorithms and supposed user expectations. This article argues that, in the context of YouTube’s commercial ecosystem, Mediakraft’s curation emphasizes celebrities, spectacular historical events, and curiosities to attract users online.

The legitimacy of public broadcasting has been under pressure for several decades. Attempts to repair and restore this legitimacy have led to an intensification of accountability instruments and measures. These instruments and measures tend to focus on consumption figures or cost-benefit analyses, requiring new ways of capturing public value. This article argues that, given the media's persistent role as an interpreter and multiplier of news via traditional distribution channels and diverse new platforms providing information and opinions, professional follow-up communication is a relevant source for the examination of broadcasters' contributions to public debate. The essay explores how the analysis of newspapers via computational methods can be used by public broadcasters to reflect on and demonstrate their role in public debates in contributing a diversity of topics and viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, British Pathé launched its YouTube channel with more than 85,000 items of audiovisual heritage from the 20th century. This article analyses the curational strategies of this channel as developed by the German multi-channel network Mediakraft in consideration of YouTube's algorithms and supposed user expectations. This article argues that, in the context of YouTube's commercial ecosystem, Mediakraft's curation emphasizes celebrities, spectacular historical events, and curiosities to attract users online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recently started project EUscreenXL builds on its predecessor EUscreen, which successfully solved a number of problems regarding the creation of online access to audiovisual sources, notably the interoperability at technical and metadata levels. In July 2011 the project EUscreen was presented in the IASA journal. In this paper, we would like to present its successor EUscreenXL, which started in March 2013. We would like to share some of the objectives of the project and discuss why and how these could be relevant for all organizations holding audiovisual archives and collections. It is EUscreenXL's objective to establish a pan-European aggregator for audiovisual heritage. EUscreenXL makes audiovisual content and metadata from broadcasters and archives searchable, findable, and accessible across Europe and supports the use of European cultural resources through Europeana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the policy of the Dutch government regarding the introduction of HDTV in the Netherlands. Utilizing a literature study and interviews with government officials, it shows that government choices are not always in line with the official neo-liberal policy, but are partly based on non-ideological, pragmatic or organizational factors. The findings of this case study challenge the presumption that policy choices made by government officials are based on rational and strategic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the commercialization of national broadcasting systems and the domination of popular television programming in Europe by international formatted television, many national television channels regularly adapted successful programmes of foreign origin. This paper investigates the history of the West German crime appeal show Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelost (File XY ... Unsolved) and its Dutch, British and French adaptations. It shows that the programme was adapted to the different national television cultures depending on the specific institutional framework and public debates about the show. Against this background, this paper raises questions regarding the comparative historiography of European television and the contribution of the transnational circulation of television shows to national identities. It argues that the adaptation of transnationally circulating television formats can be best understood as a process of negotiation in which national television cultures redefine their identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of food is one of the major world-wide challenges. In this perspective paper, we set-up a framework for a multi-disciplinary future food systems approach, building on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We hereby combine a truly sustainable approach including social science aspects combined with the One Health approach. Scientists from a large number of backgrounds have addressed four key areas that are discussed in more detail in this paper: (i) nature inspired food production, (ii) sustainable immune resilience, (iii) social and cultural change of food behavior, and (iv) food fairness. We believe that transformations to integrated future food system approaches should move beyond single solutions and can only be solved by working in transdisciplinary settings of science, society, and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]