Every month, Cristina, our Romanian editor, tracks and compiles the statistics of the European Parliament’s website. This is not an easy job, as the stats tool provided to us was developped when Google was still a snail-mail service , which requires a lot of requests sent to a remote server (we suspect it’s localized right next to Alpha Centauri, judging by its reactivity), Excel fiddling, macros’ magic and all that sort of things. Amongst all of the data we look at and that I won’t share here because I know the European Commission is reading this blog, the one we like most is the top ten.
As the name says, the top ten proposes the most read stories, all 22 languages summed up, by our readers on our Headlines. Since writing synopsis for those stories and then writing them in their languages is the bread and butter of our team, we are always extremely curious about what our visitors chose to read. With drums and trumpets, here come the February most wanted stories on our main website (March top ten will be published after Easter. Alpha Centauri goes skiing, that’s why).
10- Wednesday in plenary: Climate change, Mahmoud Abbas, car crisis
During the Plenary week, we publish daily summaries of what happened the day before. On this Wednesday, M. Abbas, the President of the Palestinian authority gave a speach to the MEPs, in which he underlined that “the longest military occupation in modern history” must end. Plenary weeks are our “prime times” in terms of visits and consultation.
9- EP Session: Guantanamo, illegal immigrants, Abbas, energy
Plenary again: we publish for each of those sessions a story highlighting the more ímportant and interesting issues that will be debated and voted. This allows our busy readers to organize their schedule so they don’t miss the live coverage of the debates. For those stuck in a meeting, there is always the nice possibility to use our video on demand section where they can browse by topics and speakers within our video footages – available in 22 languages. One can even download a speach one likes and sends it to a friend. And yes, some people actually do that – that’s how Mr Hannan became an Internet meme.
This is a monthly project. We choose a topic (like “Hard times?”) and we propose to our readers to send us a photo to illustrate this topic. The photo we like the most is published on the EP website – that was the subject of this story. The other photos we like are published on our flickr account. March topic is “Pollution/solution” and we will publish the photos we chose on Friday 3 April. This will the day we will reveal the next topic as well.
Next time, i'll choose a nice photo. Promised.
7- Should Europe take in Guantanamo prisoners? Join the debate
Since we opened our Election section, in January 2009, we have proposed a weekly debate. We choose a subject we think is interesting and we call on our readers to leave comments in their language. This story was about the possible arrival of ex-Guantanamo prisoners in Europe, a question debated during the Plenary. It brought us a lot of comments, actually, that are all on line. You cannot comment anymore on this debate, but we have one every week, if you really feel like it’s time for you to say something. And you’re welcome to comment on this blog, of course. We are quite pleased with this interactive feature on our website, even if it doesn’t go without raising some interesting questions regarding the moderation.
6- Climate change MEP Karl-Heinz Florenz responds to people’s comments
From time to time, when we close the comments of a debate on the Election website, we meet an MEP who has written a report about the issue and we relay to him the best comments left by our visitors. So did we for this story, where Mr Florenz answers questions posted by our visitors, like this one “If our planet disappears, what will we do with the money?” (Pavlos, from Greece). And no, we don’t know Pavlos.
5- What impact will sites like Facebook and YouTube have in the EP elections?
We all wish we had an answer to this question, dont’ we? In this piece, MEPs give us their (quite positive) views. The story was also open to comments for a week, but it didn’t meet such success in that respect. Incidently, we’ll be on Facebook and MySpace very very soon, promoting the European elections. More on this a bit later on this blog. Now, that’s what they call “suspense”.
This is a typical interesting work for our team, with a concrete subjet that concerns our readers, good quotes from MEPs, and the very touching photo found by Pietro, our photographer.
4 – Gas crisis highlights need for energy security say MEPs
Another story published during the Plenary week. Serious business, here, as the Russia-Ukraine gaz dispute affected 17 countries this winter. This is a typical interesting work for our team, with a concrete subjet that concerns our readers, good quotes from MEPs, and the very touching photo found by Pietro, our photographer.
3- MEPs debate sanctions against employers of undeclared workers
I told you Plenary weeks were our prime time… This story was also published during February session. You’ll find here the number of illegal immigrants in EU, the yearly increase of this number and the best ways to tackle their employeers. We wrote a lot of stories on the immigration topic, some of them are actually gathered in two of our Features. Immigration belongs to those important subject where the EP can make a difference, by the way.
2- Minority protection in Europe: “a great paradox”
Peter mentioned this story in his last post. I am personally surprised it met such an audience – but what do I know about minorities? The interview tells us all on the subject – worth reading, honestly, as many of our visitors already did. Regarding interviews, our editors love to do them but they don’t like to write them. It’s a bit too close to translation and they prefer it when they can work from a well bullet-pointed synopsis. We keep scheduling interviews, though, because it’s a nice format for the website – and most of them are “stolen” by others media.
More drums, more trumpets, here comes the monthly most read story:
1- MEPs respond to call to protect Europe’s wilderness
No surprise: a Plenary story. Surprise: it’s about preserving the 1% of EU territory that is still untouched. 1% only. You’ll see that the story is on the short-side (we tend to sharpen more and more our angles to write shorter and to provide relevant links to more substance at the end of all our articles), which fits well with our concept of “tapas story” we developped in order to cover more subjects. However, if I had suspected this would be so popular, I’d have maybe pushed for more. Maybe we’ll come back later on this subject.
On a final note, all those ten stories here are linked to their English version. But, as I am sure you are aware, you can switch to one of the 22 languages we write in by selecting it in the list box at the right-top corner of all the European Parliament website’s pages, then click on the “OK” button and, voilà!, it’s in Maltese.
Very interesting indeed ! Environnement, minority protection, social aspects far ahead of energy security ! Without forgetting its priorities, the Council and the Commission should take into account this result and work hard to answer to citizens’ demands !
That would definitely help Europe to progress !
Just yesterday a friend of mine asked me which issues were the most read, and he – somebody working in the EU business – was very suprised to discover that readers’ interest doesn’t necessarily coincide with the supposed EU’s priorities!
It is very useful to have these statistics to get a feed-back on our work and to get closer to our ‘audience’.