The process of the hearings of designated commissioners, which starts today and will go on until Tuesday 19 January, gives me a good opportunity to illustrate some of the biggest difficulties in our job as web-editors for the European Parliament website.
Everyone dies at the end.
The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father, the King, and then taken the throne and married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. The play vividly charts the course of real and feigned madness—from overwhelming grief to seething rage—and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.
We, informing about an institution we belong to, cannot use the full tool box.
This is the synopsis of Hamlet, as proposed by Wikipedia. Anyone having watched or read the play would start commenting: Hamlet is so much more than that. It’s full of emotions, plots, twists and so on. Others would object it’s boring, long, over-estimated. When reporting on what the European Parliament does, we find ourselves in this exact situation. We are bound to the quest of impartiality and objectivity. The play performed within the Plenary or the committees may be extremely passionnated or boring like hell, our role is to wait for the final outcomes and to present them in the most accurate and interesting manners.
Our own Elsinore - from our Flickr profile.
The difficulty lies in the “being interesting” part. People read books, watch movies or plays because something is happening. There are conflicts between characters, main protagonists have a goal to reach and obstacles to defeat. News media use the same trick, filling up their reports with emotions, strong characters, human touches. They allow some of their staff to use their voices, turning the piece of news in an editorial or a personal opinion.
Most European politicians have jumped on the storytelling trend too, often replacing traditional political messages with good, simple stories to tell.
We, informing about an institution we belong to, cannot use the full tool box.
Take the hearing: they hardly started and corridors are already full of rumours. We will daily write about the hearings that will have taken place the previous day, but there is no way we can jump to any conclusion. This is because, for each heard Commissioner, the parliamentary committee will first meet in camera (meaning nobody else than the Members can know what is discussed in the said meeting), then they’ll write a confidential letter to the President of the Parliament. In this letter, the committees’ members give their view about the candidate Commissionner they’ve questioned. Then the Conference of Presidents (all political groups leaders) considers the results of all hearings and decide on the vote they will recommend to all Members when the College of commissionners will be presented in a Plenary meeting.
Now, I’ll reveal an open secret: the “confidential” letters? Every journalist in Brussels gets them before we do. At least it sure seems that way. As you guess, the whole process is surrounded by rumours, speculations, crystal ball gazing. It’s great. Even for people who don’t give a damn about the whole EU thing, you could sell it.
Brainboxes unsure to get their job.
This is how I would tell the story complying with Hemingway’s six words’ rule.
Unfortunately: we just cannot.
Because we belong to this Institution, we must respect the rules. The procedure. By doing so, we establish, piece after piece, the reputation and the personality of the institution as a locutor (or a speaker if you’re not into linguistic theory as I am). You, as a citizen, want this locutor to be reliable – all the time. You want it to help you to understand what is really going on, to clarify what belongs to the fairy tales told by some politicians, to the extravaganza shouted by others and to the simple, factual, procedural truth. But this, my friends, requires a little time. And waiting is often boring. You, as a citizen, want, need perhaps, us to be boring. So you can be super interesting and funny in your pieces of news, your blog’s posts, your coffee time chats. We will back you up: facts, real quotes, heavy processes. We’ll be here to be your reference, the footnote in your essay, the hyperlink to source your argumentation.
We do our best to be as un-boring as possible – but try to describe a soccer game with no adjectives, no personal judgement, and no discrimination amongst 22 players even if some didn’t touch the ball. And don’t forget all referees, please. This is cramping. This is what we do.
Very transparent post about the challenge of being an EP webeditor http://bit.ly/5R90yg #eu /via @linotherhino
Funny, I just blogged yesterday about how, on the whole, our message is quite dull. I think you outline very well many of the reasons why this is so. I equally think this is probably a very good thing – it’s about getting consensus and making policy that reflects all the many different facets at European level, but that process and all the checks and balances within it make for slightly boring stories…
Very transparent post about the challenge of being an EP webeditor http://bit.ly/5R90yg (via @mathewlowry @JulienFrisch) #eu
Very transparent post about the challenge of being an EP webeditor http://bit.ly/5R90yg (via @mathewlowr @JulienFrisch) #eu
Well worth reading! RT @mathewlowry:enjoying the conversation on http://bit.ly/5R90yg
enjoying the conversation on http://bit.ly/5R90yg
No, I don’t think you’ll be short of work soon either … ;-)
This conversation is reminding me of others, so I was going to write more here, but it got very long. I’ll post something later. Hopefully my trackback won’t get caught up with the Russian viagra mafia …
@Mathew
Bit of a “next shiny object” mentality setting in round here perhaps… :-)
Of course MEPs will themselves get into social media, and that will help move things along. That said, at least in the immediate future, we don’t see that as depriving us of a role. What we can do that no member, party or group can do is provide an institutional (i.e. neutral/credible) space where social media users can come to have their debates and discussions in a kind of political no-man’s land.
So we see ourselves potentially as facilitators, moderators, guarantors even. But like everything else in this area, it’s provisional – who knows where things will go?
Meanwhile, a detail still pleads in favour of us having a role to play, the base of nearly 60,000 FB fans we have established – a critical mass it remains difficult to find anywhere else for the time being.
Thanks for your comments (this one was in the spam too… You must have a doppelganger somewhere).
Many thanks for the detailed response and thoughtful perspectives on EC-EP differences.
When you write “Hence our curent efforts to make our social media a channel for communication between our fans and MEPs”, does this mean that you see your goal as getting the MEPs engaged in social media, rather than ‘doing’ social media yourselves?
In other words, once all MEPs are engaged in social media, will the officials step back, ‘mission accomplished’, and get back to focusing on the facts, leaving opinions to the elected representatives?
[Or, more likely, move on to pilot the next shiny object, and bring it back down the mountain for the MEPs to play with...]
Cheerio,
Mathew
PS No viagra, Russian or otherwise, around here …
@Mathew
First, sorry for the delay in moderating your comment. Somehow it ended up in our spam filter and we only just spotted it. (You haven’t been selling viagra through any Russian websites lately, have you?)
On what you say, we were extremely interested to see what our friends in the Commission are doing. We are not associated with this directly. The easiest reason to give would be to say that we weren’t asked! But that would be unfair and would misrepresent the situation.
The open letter is addressed by Commission staff to their political masters. It aims, I suppose, to exploit a particular moment – the creation of the new Commission – to push for a new online communications policy.
In the EP, our position is a little different. First, we are a much smaller oganisation, meaning that our web communications policy is in the hands of a single DG and our online presence coordinated by that DG. We don’t produce everything here, of course, but we do the stuff going under the name “communications” and exercise general editorial oversight. That’s why we can maintain a unified graphical look and consistent “branding”. In the Commission open letter you can see clearly that these conditions do not pertain there.
Second, more importantly, we don’t NEED to write such a letter. The political authorities of the EP have given us a clear mandate to develop Web 2.0 tools and social media in our ongoing communications activities online. We are still bound by our institutional role, of course, but we are already pushing ahead with all the stuff we launched ahead of the elections: Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter et al, within that role.
Third, as for engaging in the “conversation”, we already do that – again in a manner necessarily constrained by our position as officials – but nevetheless in a meaningful way, notably through Facebook and indeed this blog. On this, another distinction between us and the Commission should be borne in mind. The Commission has a “line”, a collective view and/or policy which staff can communicate. The Parliament is composed of opinions often greatly at variance which each other. When it comes to opinion or policy, we have to hold back as officials. Hence our curent efforts to make our social media a channel for communication between our fans and MEPs.
Lastly, and a little tangentially, it must be borne in mind that, in the institutional setup, Parliament and Commission are at least to some degree antagonists. We have different messages and must not be too cosy, for fear of perpetuating the misleading notion that EU institutions are all the same thing. We have recently had great cooperation with our colleagues in the EC on a whole range of things, but we have and must have separate messages.
All that said, good look to them with this letter!
Aah, the joy of institutional communications!
All discussions need to be based on facts, and you’re absolutely right that your job is to provide them.
But does that mean that you cannot join in the discussion as well, as set out in the open letter to resident Barroso and incoming Commissioners (http://dicknieuwenhuis.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/please-use-web-2-0-for-europe/)?
Why isn’t the EP represented in that letter, btw? Is each Institution figuring this out for themselves? Ironic, really, given that it’s all about forming networks…
Nice one, Tibo!
Covering the Hearing? For us: "Not the 8 o’clock news" http://bit.ly/69cjlY on our team's blog.#eu2010