Dragomir, who also teaches journalism courses at the Vienna-based Central European University (CEU), has designed a framework for the study of public service media in the platformised media ecosystem, which analyses the performance of public service media in five key areas: funding, governance and management, audience engagement, editorial independence, and professional development. During his stay in Vienna, Dragomir is conducting research about the Austrian public media as part of his study. The goal is to map the strengths and weaknesses of the public service media in Europe to anticipate how its role will change under economic and political pressures in the future. The study is conducted as part of Valcomm, a research project carried out by USC.
The work on public service media is part of a larger line of research, focused on media capture, that Dragomir is leading at the Media and Journalism Research Center. During his stay in Vienna, Dragomir held a lecture at the CMC’s Talk series where he spoke about media capture, which he believes is the most disruptive phenomenon affecting editorial independence today. As Dragomir wrote in a 2019 study, media capture is an extreme form of control whereby “most or all of the news media institutions are operating as part of a government-business cartel that controls and manipulates the flow of information with the aim of protecting their unrestricted and exclusive access to public resources.”