In Britain they call it the “silly season”, elsewhere it might just be called the “big holidays” (grandes vacances), but whatever you call it, it’s a bit of a headache for anyone running a news website.  The European Parliament’s summer recess is actually shorter than that of most of the continent’s national parliaments, but when it comes it effectively puts the place to sleep for five or six weeks.  To reflect this reality, Parliament’s staff are actually obliged to take at least two successive weeks of their annual leave during the summer recess.  So as far as the “news” parts of Parliament’s website are concerned, there’s not much to be done – we only have one editor per language and, when in practice the majority of them are obliged to be absent at the same time, the shop has to close.

So what to do to keep the site alive between mid-July and late August?  Answer: just as for TV stations across the old continent, summer time means repeats!  Except we call them “replays”.  This year we have selected nine collections of our articles from the last six months according to themes.  We have VIPs in Parliament, for example, with a selection of our interviews of the great and good:  We have made a selection of our own favourites (“editors choice”) and made another (non-overlapping) collection of “most-read” articles, those our stats show to have been popular.  We looked back our little selection of showbiz personalities who at appeared on the site for a bit of summer glitz, and even scoured our output for some real “silly season” material – lighter hearted material from the last few months.  On the latter, we were a bit disappointed – we seem to have been very serious recently (note to self: more “Friday” stories!).

In a great rush before everyone leaves, happening as I write this post (the rush, not yet the leaving!), everyone is copy-pasting the material into a series of features to be published on pre-set dates over the next few weeks.  New photos have been selected to head up each feature and banners will adorn the website alerting our faithful readers to each new Replay as it is published.  We did this, on a rather smaller scale, last year, and saw our website traffic hold up quite nicely by summer standards.  Let’s see how it goes this year.  Should you wish, dear blog-reader, you could give us a small hand by clicking right here, and finding out what you may have missed. 

Meanwhile, if you have them, happy holidays with La Une!