Suddenly, as happens in many families, the youngest sibling is not the youngest any more.  The Web Communications unit has long traded on its image as the youngest and hippest unit in the DG Communication family.  Maybe, just now and then, we have been able to get away with things our older brethren couldn’t have pulled off, while perhaps too a rather more careful paternal surveillance of our constantly latent youthful excess has been exercised than in the case of older and wiser colleagues. 

But as from last Wednesday, the yawling from the next room tells us that we have a younger sibling, usurping our status as brat-on-the-block and focus of well-meaning parental control.  I speak of course of EuroparlTV, the new web TV service of the European Parliament.

As with any new family arrival, attention has been lavished on the new baby.  My google alerts have been laden with opinion on the subject from across the globe, right round to the antipodes and back.  Opinions are mixed. Some are (rightly) impressed at the sheer ambition of the undertaking (there is nothing else like it… anywhere), others praise the commitment to transparency it represents, while others again fear it as a exercise in propaganda cynically deployed by devious eurocrats (yep, them again) to brainwash a general public they obviously consider too feeble minded to cope.  My favourite today was a US-based website which saw it, alongside papal web TV, as further confirmation of biblical prophecies about plots for the re-establishment of the evil Holy Roman Empire! (Check it out, it gives a most flattering impression of our power to influence European public opinion…)

But this is not actually about EuroparlTV, it is about the older sibling.  Everyone knows that a young child cannot help holding slightly ambivalent views about a new arrival in the house.  Jealous?  Us?  Of course not!  No mixed feelings as our new colleagues are upbraided for their follies of youth, as they try to assert themselves with brave new editorial ideas in the weekly editorial committee?  Well, it’s true we kind of liked being the ones pushing the limits, challenging the status quo, though it is also not totally unpleasant to watch some-one cast in the role of the naughty one for a change.  Ambivalent?  You got it! 

The trick now of course is not to allow ourselves to be cast in the role of the mellow older sibling.  We have to join forces with the newcomer, discover all the things we can achieve together.  We are in reality natural allies, the internet generation, with a lot to offer each other (take a look at our teaser banner campaign to see how much we actually do love the new baby).  Look forward to the era of the terrible (web) twins!