The primary task of our team is to write and publish stories in 22 languages, written for the general audience of the European Parliament website. By general audience, we mean people who don’t have a clue of what the EU is, nor the difference between the Parliament and the Commission. Most of them don’t know their MEPs, go and figure that.

Reporters & editors busy working in the newsroom at the KANSAS CITY STAR newspaper.

Every working day, our 22 editors (one by official language of the European Union) write and publish 2 to 3 stories. Some stories are short, some are long. Each story comes with a photo, with a bunch of links to know more about the subject, sometimes with an embedded video from our sister team europarltv. All elements are manually put together by each editor in an home made Content Management System (which little name is “IM-Press”), solid as a rock, fast as a slug.

Twice a week, every editors update our promoting areas:

• the three horizontal boxes on the middle of our page which look like this (we call them “Visuals”):

Three visuals promoting good stories or videos

• the three vertical boxes on the left middle of our page (we call them “ads” – we’re so good at names):

Ads are just different promoting boxes

Ads and Visuals are also managed by our content management system.

Of course, sometimes a story is actually bigger than a regular article  and they may have to write a full dossier on a subject.

Every week, our editors also publish little bits of content for other areas of the website. It can be texts for special event webpages, proofreading of translated content (usually, they have to rewrite it all, almost), labels, menus etc. They tend to dislike those petty things to do because they distract them from watching YouTube and they often come at the last minute with a deadline for yesterday. Editors blame the coordinators for that and they are right. The coordinators blame the Boss. We don’t know who the Boss blames. Most people consider we have a website in 22 languages. Actually, from our point of view, we have 22 websites and only one editor for each. We survive with a lot of coordination and goodwill, but the lack of back-ups and the increase of small demands are difficult to manage.

In order to write their stories, editors need a fully approved synopsis. If Steve is the one approving the synopses, editors are the ones writing them. Every two weeks, an editor writes (in pair with a colleague or alone) one or two synopses. A good synopsis takes quite a long time to produce: you need context and background, fresh quotes from MEPs, a good structure, some facts and numbers… When this is your synopsis writing week, you know it will be a busy one. We consume six to twelve synopses a week.

When they are not writing

When they’re not writing, editors propose stories for the week ahead. They are now organized in seven “topics teams” (like “World”, “Business”, “Society”) and must come to our Wednesday meeting with suggestions for the next week schedule.  This is also time consuming: they need to check committees’ agendas, to review the press, to feel what the good subjects are, the best angles, the promising developments… They talk with our colleagues from the Press Room, with their contacts.

Every editor has also to write a post on this blog every six weeks or so. Some of them find the time to write spontaneous posts, which is a wonder in itself.

Of course, when they’re not writing, they also might attend some events, say a committee meeting or an hearing, so they can produce a synopsis. Or they are in an interview with a VIP or an MEP.

Most of the time, when editors are not writing, they work on their project. They all have at least one but it happens that some of them are between two projects. What do we call “projects”? Well, the social-media team (four editors) is one of them, in charge of updating our EP Facebook profile, to keep an eye on the comments, to answer some questions… and to go to a lot of meetings to explain, present, defend what we do on Facebook. The YouTube page is another one. And so is our MySpace. We have a lot of them, from managing the media strategy for a Prize or a hot topic to brainstorming on our next online platform or application, checking the stats, babysitting my cat etc. The projects are time consuming: meetings, briefs, notes, presentations… You know the drill.

Every editor has also to write a post on this blog every six weeks or so. Some of them find the time to write spontaneous posts, which is a wonder in itself.

So, they’re busy. As busy are our other team members: our photographer, our support-editors (they basically do the same tasks as our editors except for the daily writing) and the coordinators.

We would like the editors to spend less time behind their keyboard and more outside, so they could report more and live an active and fruitful professional life. Alas, their bread and butter remain the publishing on the Headlines.  We try to publish less when we can, we try to write shorter (which is asking more work from the synopses writers) but the European Parliament is dealing with more and more issues and someone has to report about those.

Even if we have solid workflows and good habbits, we always try to improve ourselves. One or twice in the year, we organize some workshops to improve our work. We try to keep our mind open for new ideas, new trends, new ways of reporting on the European Parliament. At the moment, we focus on the future of our digital strategy.  We also wonder how we could improve the coverage of the plenary sessions.

There is always something new to propose, something different to implement. Which may explain why being an editor is so interesting, in the “I’ll call you back I’m busy at the moment” way of interesting.