@Mathew – Thanks for your comment. I let deliberately (so far) social medias out of the picture, because I wanted to focus on the way we produce and publish content. Social media, of which I am a full supporter, are mainly a way to promote our content and to call people to react, discuss, comment. It’s been proven successful on our Facebook page. I’ll come back to this in a future post, as well as on your very interesting views of segmenting our audience by interests rather than by estimated knowledge of the EP/EU.

The two teams are historically necessary because they don’t do the same job. The Press team handles journalists: contact, networking, support while we are writing only in a less deep way. Now, one could imagine the Press team could start to write just like us, but that’s a recurrent internal debate we have with them :-)

@Simon Blackley. Thanks to yo too. Living story is a nice way to apply what I call controlled aggregated content on a subject. This is one of our path of development for the next months and I’ll come back in details in a soon to be published post.

Best,
T.

I feel for you: trying to find a ‘connection with citizen’ or a ‘human interest’ angle when your content is built around ‘EP activities and hard news’ is a challenge, particularly if you can’t use political conflict to spice things up.

I’ve never been convinced by the ‘general public’ / ‘eu policy expert’ divide, either. It short changes the 99% of the population who fall into the ‘can’t recite the Lisbon Treaty by heart or live in B-1040, so must be general public’ category.

Everybody’s interested in something – it’s just a matter of degree. Moreover, how interested you are will vary by subject.

I may be passionate about social media; very interested in climate change; and not very interested in, say, sports legislation. The guy next to me in the metro, however, is a sports lawyer working for G17 – he couldn’t give a damn about eParticipation, but he can quote EU sports and employment legislation chapter and verse.

Unfortunately, EU communications are still divided organisationally – two teams in the EP, God Knows how many DG WebTeams in the EC, etc.

But the only people who care about the institutional arrangements are the EU policy experts.

For the rest – shortchanged again – it’s just ‘Europe’. The challenge is to show that ‘Europe adds value’ in their field of interest.

Lumping this audience together in one group doesn’t help – and dividing the communications teams along Institutional lines this audience doesn’t understand makes it worse.

We can’t expect your Latvian grandmother to understand the co-decision procedure. But if she cares about third world poverty, we should be able to provide a topical, not organisational, interface to explain Europe’s role in development aid.

This elementary, Web1.0 goal seems a long way off, so I’m not holding my breath until we see this translated into social media. That will be the day when EU webteams cooperate along topical lines, engaging in online communities and referring people to EP, EC and Council activities and websites.

Or am I being pessimistic?

One of the difficulties of communicating European affairs (or, in fact, any major news story) is to give the reader who needs it the historical context to understand the latest development.

In terms of editorial models to address this challenge, have you looked at the recent Google/NY Times/Washington Post ‘Living Stories’ experiment http://www.livingstories.googlelabs.com/ ?

The code has now been open-sourced to allow others to develop what I think of as ‘threaded news’. Worth considering…