Future Leaders Competition 2025

What is this initiative?

The IIC Future Leaders Competition, now in its eighth year, and supported by the members of the IIC, encourages and promotes original thought in the areas of communications and policy.

What do you need to do?

This year entrants are asked to produce an essay, submitted electronically, on the following topic:

‘Grabbing your attention’: media plurality and the digital ecosystem

In an age of increasing choice and with fierce competition for attention, what are the issues that regulators face as they consider the production and distribution of content (user-generated and curated) from a variety of sources? Much regulatory policy has come from a desire to reduce risk to the viewer or user, but how potent are the risks from areas such as concentration of media ownership in a world where algorithms increasingly hold sway? And has the dynamic nature of content production and distribution led to a burgeoning of overlapping regulatory remits (and a consequent drag on innovation) as the digital environment intersects areas that traditionally sat in one sector?

In your essay for this year’s Future Leaders Competition, we invite you to consider whether there still is a need for national regulatory policies for media pluralism (and its attendant issues) or are they obsolete in a global digital world? Does it matter where you get your information from?

Please submit your essay directly to enquiries@iicom.org

You should:

• Develop a sustained and well-structured response, addressing the questions asked
• Show evidence and justification for your position
• Show an awareness & understanding of contending viewpoints
• Show commercial awareness & understanding of competitive market forces