But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I totally forget that in “normal” life I’m an official for the European Parliament. Questions from friends and family are here to remind me my “duties”. This summer, I also read a very interesting book: Jean Monnet’s memoirs.

Jean Monnet (on the left) with Robert Schuman © Conseil de l'Europe, Strasbourg - Source: Fondation Jean Monnet pour l'Europe

You’re going to think I’m a Euro geek… Well, maybe a bit, even if the reason for this reading was simply that I got this book as a gift from our Secretary General, and I hate getting a book without reading it.

Now that I’ve read it, it would be a shame not to share this experience. I doubt a lot of people will enjoy these 800 pages written in French… Here are a few quotes that I found particularly interesting, and which can be the starting point of more extensive reflexions.

• “I was convinced that we can’t go forward without a certain disorder“: It’s good to be organized, as I am… but a certain disorder is probably necessary to be creative. I’ll try to make use of this in the next months!

• “Sovereign states are not any more the framework where today’s problems can be solved“; “The aim of the Council of the EU is to find a common view and not to look for compromises between national interests“: interesting enough in today’s context, where every country is trying to get the best possible deal for itself in Brussels… Don’t we forget our common interest while doing that? And how to make people interested in what Europe does if the focus stays purely national?

• “People only accept change when it’s absolutely necessary, and they see this necessity only in crises“: Well, that’s just a bit of hope in the crisis Europe is facing (I mean the question of the sense and aim of the EU, not the economic crisis)”The difficulties were not in the things but in the spirits”: Hey, that’s why communication is so important!

• “Institutions, once created, have their own force which goes beyond people’s will. But only the people can change and enrich the things the institutions then transmit to future generations“: Nothing to add, that defines the limits and potentialities of our role as civil servants.

• “Nothing can be really finished, and it’s a talent to know where to stop before too much care destroys the balance achieved“: This quote made me think about perfectionism and helped me to become aware of certain problems in the way I deal with my daily work. I discussed it with my colleague Anete, who explained me the Pareto principle. That made me think about efficiency at work…

For its five-years-old birthday gift, in May 2010, the Huffington Post saw its consultation overtake old-well-established digital emanations of print media. Its monthly traffic reached 12.7 million uniques (that’s 12.7 million single individuals who visited the website) and  more than 50 million visits.

New editorial heroes?

Is it big? The same month, the Wall Street Journal got *only* 8.2 million uniques and the Washington Post 7.9 million. The online news leader remains the New York Times, with 18.9 million uniques. The burning question spreading across all editorial lips is, of course: for how long? If you look at the trends below, coming from two different statistical websites, they show how the gap is closing between HuffPo and NYT:

Huffington Post traffic in red (monthly uniques) Image: Comscore, Huffington Post

(c) Comscore

For all editorial actors playing in the digital world, in a perfect timing with the recent controversy about the quality of pure digital players (well, notably in France vis-à-vis Mediapart, the rise of HuffPo is a good news. Believe it or not, you still have people (even colleagues) who miss the good old days when they was no Internet and who believe nothing really serious ever takes place there. You can’t change the world with Facebook, can you?

Huffington Post is a pure player whose editorial model combines more or less everything we’ve discussed in this series. It started as a collective blog, gathering posts by Ms Huffington and her crew of young wannabes:

“A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its “Bloggers Index”, but includes: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Heather Robinson, Michael Moore, Jimmy Demers, Madonna, Alec Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saskia Sassen, Sheryl Sandberg, John Cusack, Larry David, Nora Ephron, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Anneli Rufus, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Albert Brooks, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Richard Patrick, Craig Newmark, Donna Karan, Kenneth Cole, Ryan J. Davis, Donatella Versace, Bill Maher, Cleo Paskal, B.D. Gallof, Lutfullah Kamran, M. K. Asante, Jr., Robert Wright, Larry Gelbart, Stephen Covey Wendy Diamond and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

I wouldn’t decline a synopsis or two by one of those.

The HuffPo is also a news aggregator, a political media, a participative space with comments and a state-of-the-art integration of social media. Amongst all the things you can share on the website, you also can rate articles via your Facebook account (and hence let your friends know what you think of what you’ve just read). This is smart, because you add your own personal value to the pleasure of sharing a resource.

Oh, and they have photo of boobs (you can rate them too on Facebook and let your friend… hum. Maybe don’t.) This is one of the major criticisms raised against the Huffington Post: they’re not serious. They’re not the New York Times. They write about anything. And their readers like it:

Only 250 like those hands (c) Huffington Post

It is true that Politics only amounts to a quarter of the website traffic and that HuffPost is about almost everything. And true too that they don’t earn money – yet.

« The Huffington Post booked about $15 million of revenue last year », says Henry Blodget on Business Insider.  « Sales boss Greg Coleman thinks the company can double revenue this year to $30 million and double it again next year, to $60 million.  And from there, as long as the site’s traffic keeps growing, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to $100+ million. (…) Now, $100+ million is not the $1 billion or so of revenue of the New York Times. But most of the $1 billion or so of the New York Times revenue is going away (its paper-based ads and subscriptions).  What will be left, eventually, when the NYT’s paper-based distribution finally collapses, are the online revenues.  And those, for now, are in the neighborhood of $150 million. »

Even if Mr Blodget pushes his luck a bit (a smart newspaper won’t quit paper, they will reduce its volume, methinks), the trend is there. Huffington Post is on its way to become one of the major online media.

What can we learn from this for a European institution?

Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves.

As exposed in Henry Blodget’s story, the Huffington Post is a typical case of a disruptive technology. Those technologies, which provoke disruption in a well-established order, don’t need to be better than existing ones (at least at the beginning). « Their advantage – the reason people begin to adopt them – is that they’re also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. » See, they’re not perfect but they work and they please. HuffPost might not be the online media every editorial brain dreams of (even if it’s already enough to fantasize about it IMHO) but people do visit and read because it fits their information needs and because it’s free.

As an European institution, we’ve checked the free part. We might well do our homework on the subversive aspect. Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves. Rather than aiming at the perfect, bulletproof communication strategy or rock solid website in 22 languages, we could try a different approach. This what we did on Facebook and it works.

In general, and Huffington Post is not the sole actor doing this, we should proceed more by trial and error. Implementing a functionality in a few languages or on a selection of pages, extending it or removing it according to its success amongst our visitors. Searching for the better, cheaper, more convenient rather than for the perfect way of proposing a feature every serious website has since 2003.

Guess what? People read what they want to

There is a truth which is not easy to hear: European institutions, when it comes to online editorial news and content, are on a niche market. We indulge ourselves in labeling our visitors as « EU experts », with all the possible declinations (journalists, lobbyists, universitarians), while crossing our fingers about catching some *real* citizens in our (inter-) net. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing bad being a niche market. This is very good marketing segmentation, usually a very profitable one. Some advertisers would happily pay some good money to reach our audience. Our visitors are smart people, international, intellectual…

But we are not in this for the money. We sweat over our stories, editorial concept and content strategies because we want to reach the citizen, my Latvian grandmother, you and, especially, your friends and family who don’t read this blog and have never visited a European Institution website.

There is nothing wrong being a niche – except, maybe, if your aim is to reach everyone. To become mainstream because you believe your editorial production reflects debates, actions and decisions that have an impact on almost everyone at a certain time. If that is your objective, then the remaining inside the niche (who says the Bubble?) will not help you.

« More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story »

What HuffPost teaches us: you can’t tell people what they want to read. They know it and they find it. True, HuffPo covers a lot of subjects, some being more mundane than others. But Ms Arianna Huffington’s pieces are far from being yellow journalism. The Huffington Post covers a wide-range of opinions, always in the American Liberal side. The important word being: « opinions. »

The rising media aggregates posts from other blogs, invites its readers to write and comment, and publishes content from its editorial team. What started as a political blog became the first pure player in five years, just by extending its editorial territory, keeping it free and multiplying its contributors. « More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story » wrote Wired in 2007.

Maybe the real way to reach more than 10 million people a month is to extend our editorial territory. To keep producing and publishing the unique content European Institutions have while multiplying external contributions, opinions, topics. Cooking receipts from all Member States? North psychology versus South therapies? Afghanistan war dispatches? Anything of a certain quality that would appeal to the readers. To apply the recipe explained by Ms Huffington herself:

“Everything is Miscellaneous, is about what happens to institutions, such as news media, when their content gets turned into a big, miscellaneous pile, that anybody can pick out of, and rearrange the pieces. So they lose control over their editorial function, the newspapers do. They lose control over their front page, which obviously is a huge part of their value.

So you look at the Huffington Post, which has a couple of dozen news sources. It presents its own front page. It has its own staff of I don’t know how many bloggers who are writing there. And it is a rearrangement of this miscellaneous pile of news in a way that makes sense to the progressive readers of this site.”

And I haven’t mentioned European boobs slideshow – yet.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age
Here’s What People Actually Want To Read
This is the Future of the News: The Arianna Huffington Interview

Catering to the elite

As I write these lines, I have my copy of the FT open on the comments section, there’s the latest European Voice somewhere in the drawer, not to mention The Economist on my bedside table, ready to lull me to sleep. To all those that warn about the threats that concentration of media ownership poses for the diversity of ideas in European public space, this surely sounds as an anathema. All of the above mentioned newspapers are namely published by Pearson, a UK media company, their target public being business and political types; it’s therefore not surprising that by and large they all toe the business-friendly editorial line.

They might not seem as such, but fiscal policy, derivatives regulation and bankers’ bonuses are politically highly charged issues in times of economic crisis. So it is particularly dangerous for a professional involved in these issues, either as a politician, journalist or a PR person, to have his views about the economic policy shaped by a very limited number of potentially biased sources.

Who sells what to whom?

As one cogent summary of Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s classic text, Manufacturing consent, has it:

“It is clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a product to readers – they are in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers. It is not just “that stories should increase readership or audience” – they should sell the right readership to the right advertisers.”

As a former editor-in-chief of a small niche newspaper, I can only attest to the accuracy of this analysis. Media content is consciously being produced in such a way as to set up a supportive environment for advertisers whose money pays the wages.

Taking the Wikipedia definition of biodiversity, “the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem … often used as a measure of the health of biological systems”, we may safely conclude that European public space is not very well served by a relatively small number of influential media having a limited scope of views on offer.

Blogs to the rescue

Luckily, however, world wide web (WWW) is another ecosystem altogether. Although democratic to a fault, giving just anybody a chance to speak his or her mind on anything and then publish it for everybody to see, a number of high-quality blogs have undermined the traditional media by offering a wider array of opinions that run counter to those promoted in the mainstream. Take the debt problems plaguing the European economy.

Taking their cue from textbook economics, all European governments are engaged in deficit cutting that is supposed to lay foundations for stronger growth in the future. The majority of pundits and journalists see this as a painful but necessary belt-tightening. But not the blogosphere.

The roll call

Here’s where the blogs come in. They allow economists such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to provide up-to-date commentary of economic developments that does not really fit into the business pages of a newspaper. They allow senior officials such as former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson to air unorthodox views about economic policy that hardly feature in mainstream coverage of economic issues. And then there are Cassandras (Edward Hugh’s EuroWatch, for example) who forecast the troubles the eurozone now finds itself mired in when mainstream media still applauded the EU for its dexterity to avoid the American-style financial meltdown.

But something certainly has changed since I was churning out agency news a couple of years ago. For me, the blogosphere has taken over from elite media as the provider of high-quality analysis of economic issues. It is always very interesting to contrast the latter with newspaper columns as it allows one to tease out hidden assumptions that govern the media construction of reality. At a time when debates rage about who is going to foot the bill of the crisis, bankers or taxpayers, blogs are becoming all the more important.

Martin Luther starring in "When Luther came to Brussels"

Swedish-speakers were given a real insider treat when former Brussels correspondent Emily von Sydow some ten years ago published a recollection of her insights into Sweden’s first years in the EU maze.

The year was 1995. It had been close, almost 50–50, but here we arrived – with Luther in the back of our heads. Sweden and Finland had joined the family, over two decades behind their southern partner Denmark, the Latin of the North. Protestant Nordics, champions of openness and modern administration, had entered a predominantly catholic union of peoples, characterized by French-inspired bureaucracy, centralisation and an air of secretiveness.

Blow of fresh air?

Blow of fresh air? Or an unavoidable clash of cultures? Women and men driven by ideals such as good order and discipline, pragmatism, punctuality and equality came to realise it was a matter of learning, adjusting and surviving. And transparency? In a culture of leaking bits of information to the chosen ones it soon became evident it was – if not all, but almost – about whom you know. Information is power, indeed.

Transparency train

Yet the debate had already emerged, in the 1980s, on the European agenda. Conscious of the democracy deficit, lack of openness and the need to try to “bridge the cap” between Brussels’ elites and the people… EU’s main three institutions took action, during the 1990s, to allow access to their documents.

Breakthrough came in 1997. With Amsterdam, transparency and openness finally made a real, though still restricted, entrée into Europe’s decision-making. The treaty stipulated EU citizens’ right to know and called for action to put it in place.

Transparency, simplicity and efficiency in EU decision-making were priorities unlikely to be presented by another than a Nordic Presidency. Finns got there first in 1999. Yet it was in May 2001, under the Swedish Presidency, that the EU finally got its first serious set of rules on access to EU institutions’ documents – symbolic or not.

Has progress been made?

A question I put some months ago to British Labour MEP Michael Cashman, Parliament’s rapporteur for the first ever EU regulation on access to documents. “Yes, but” – he answered. The MEP, having become “something of a train spotter” for transparency, has now been working on the 9-year old EU rules’ revision.

Certain institutional and cultural reluctance towards transparency still exists, Cashman noted. Speaking about year 1999, former EastEnders‘ star explained: “It was felt that it would slow up the work of institutions, that they would be less effective and that somehow scrutiny was something to be worried about”.

New clothes needed

“But there are also faults and the clothes we gave to the first born are no longer fitting”. In order to make access to documents easy, Cashman has proposed, among others, a common register for EU institutions’ documents, “one doorway saying European Union access to documents, where you go in and type your request”.

“If you are a journalist, if you are a lobbyist, you will know your way around the maze”. Exercising and testing the boundaries of the right to access EU documents has fallen largely in the hands of those who already “believe” and know. Statewatch for example is notoriously famous for having drafts on sensitive issues such as the EU–US “SWIFT” agreement even ahead of the MEPs. And if you are not? “Citizens should be able to access documents online, despite the administrative burden”, Cashman argues.

With Lisbon the EU entered yet another era in transparency, the new treaty reconfirming the need to take decisions “as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen”. Making the EU’s other legislator, the Council, to legislate doors open, “people will see in Finland, the UK, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, wherever, that things are not imposed by Brussels, but actually agreed by their governments acting in Council. And they’ll be able to see how their governments voted”, Cashman reminds us.

With the risk of starting to sound all too complacent, one cannot talk about transparency without mentioning the European Ombudsman. The EU’s first ever parliamentary watchdog Jacob Söderman got credit for being a “people’s champion” for openness, like European Voice put it, dressing, well, the Finn, as a crusader. Despite years of work in this field, the successor Greek Nikiforos Diamandouros still faces similar challenges: of the 355 inquiries he completed in 2008 , 36 % dealt with a lack of transparency, including a refusal to provide information or documents.

Why does transparency matter?

With Lisbon the EU entered yet another era in transparency, the new treaty reconfirming the need to take decisions “as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen”. Making the EU’s other legislator, the Council, to legislate doors open, “people will see in Finland, the UK, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, wherever, that things are not imposed by Brussels, but actually agreed by their governments acting in Council. And they’ll be able to see how their governments voted”, Cashman reminds us.

Citizens have a right to know. This is pure basics of a democratic system. Without knowing what is being and has been decided, and why, you cannot participate, nor can you try to hold decision-makers accountable.

Right to know and be informed

That brings us to the other side of the coin: the administration’s duty to inform and communicate its work and decisions – in an understandable way. Yet we know that communication involves choices. It cannot therefore replace the right to access information and documents.

Transparency, openness, access to documents, clarity of EU communication… these all are keys to the legitimacy of EU politics and laws so dearly sought after.

The hurdles of opening up EU’s businesses to citizens’ participation and oversight will be back on the MEPs’ plate after the summer break. After having been stalled at an interinstitutional level, the stumbling blocks now seem to be indoors the one-year-old new Parliament.

What do EU and dogs have in common?

“A very typical Finnish subject!” was the reaction when I recently mentioned my interest in transparency issues in a job interview. Sure: we Nordics tend to have a special liking for the case of open administration, and like to think we have worked to get the rest of the EU on board. A lot has changed since 1995, much for the better, and also not only thanks to the Nordics. The EU itself has almost doubled in size. But transparency and openness still matter and benefit all of us, no?

…As for von Sydow, unlike many other Swedes and Finns, she doesn’t seem to have grown tired of Brussels ways. She writes, just around the EP corner, on European affairs – and sometimes dogs.

No, this isn’t one more European’s rant against our transatlantic sister. It actually concerns something entirely different: viral marketing, the unruly cousin of any “proper” communication strategy that seems to have followed the same path with astonishing speed.

I don’t remember exactly when or what my first exposure to viral marketing was, but I’m pretty sure it was some YouTube video a few years ago. I am also almost certain it concerned a car but that’s all I can say. It was however a revelation. It was clever, funny and just a little dangerous. It wouldn’t bring the froth to the mouth of any of the usual defenders of our “public morality”, but you knew that this little clip could never
find a slot on any TV channel on earth. Yet within weeks, days maybe, thousands upon thousands had seen it. More importantly perhaps they had chosen to watch it, rather than have it blasted at them across the living room during the semi-conscious twilight of the ad break.

We saw it all, from the unruly children advertising contraception, to the superhero grannies advertising cars that are hard to steal, to remember just a couple. And I am speaking of viral ads here, not viral videos in general which are quite different: they don’t “sell” anything and in that sense fall outside the scope of this post.

The original viral ad, whichever that was, and the clips that followed by the hundreds, were almost uniformly brilliant. Something you could and would discuss with your friends and colleagues. What was most important however, from a marketing point of view, wasn’t so much the naughtiness, as the nagging sense of disbelief. Is this a “real ad”? Is it the work of some unknown YouTube Kurosawa, toiling away in the family loft when he ought to have a proper job, a family and a… real car? Who knew?

Somehow, at the back of everyone’s conscience it was pretty clear that the “viral”, being as slick as it was, could only be the work of pros and so another theory quickly emerged: that they were produced by advertising companies and then dumped by the customer for being too racy, only to find their way onto the web.

I remember that close to 90% of the discussion wasn’t on the clip itself, brilliant though it was but on whether it was a mistake, a trick, a real ad that had made it to YouTube, whether the company advertised was behind it or not. Yet even that was more suspension of disbelief than outright credulousness. It did get the discussion going though and that was the point.

It was, in short, revolutionary. It probably cost as much as a proper ad to create and then essentially nothing to disseminate. And it was cool in the way Captain Jack Sparrow will always, by definition, be cooler than his redcoat nemesis.

And then within a very, very few years, months maybe, captain Sparrow pulled up a leprous coat-sleeve to reveal the red underneath. No one can have any illusions any more and to crown it all, there are now even “official” virals, with a very basic Google search turning up hundreds of examples.

Let me be clear on one thing. It is neither naughty nor illegitimate. In fact its far more legitimate than a “true” viral in the sense that those putting out “official” virals own up to them from the start, even presenting them in… official press events. In reality, their “viral” aspect is making them available on the web and hoping they are good enough to be spread by people. Maybe that is what viral is all about: encouraging people to spread your message for you because said message is good enough (read funny enough) to merit spreading.

In fact it’s pretty brilliant. If I see something truly good on the web, I will send the link out to my friends. But, come to think of it, I will rarely send it out to everyone I know,  only those I know will appreciate it: I will in a sense do the audience-targeting myself because I know that if I send it to someone who won’t, or can’t, get it, I will end up with an egg on my face.

I did it back when we thought the virals were pirate stuff and I do it now that we know they aren’t exactly that and the rate at which I, in turn, receive viral ads from my friends hasn’t exactly diminished. If anything it has grown proving the value of the medium.

Yet there is something missing. Maybe it’s the titillation of not really knowing if it is real marketing or not that does it. Or maybe the fact that an official viral has to maintain all or most of the decorum expected of a proper ad. The new virals may be good, even very good, but the smoke-and-mirrors magic show has left the scene, the giggly mystery of the country fair magician is lost.

It is like discovering that Sparrow isn’t Teach but Drake, not a really a pirate but a privateer, doing his stuff on a “letter of marque” issued by the throne. Drake was more effective and historically important than the Blackbeard. But whom of the two does every schoolchild know?

An official viral can still be funny and effective as a marketing tool, but it is also like discovering that it’s FIFA employees who blow the vuvuzelas. It somehow takes all the fun out of it and along with the fun maybe, just maybe, it takes away some of the marketing effect. Or does it?

(c) Brian Lane Winfield Moore

Meta-enabling journalism has been defined in a series of short tweets by Andrew Golis, Yahoo News editor, I will quote below in their chronological order (reversed to the order in the screen shot illustrating this post). Wait! We gonna discuss an editorial concept drafted in four 140 signs max long sentences? Yep, the world is changing, isn’t it?

The new online business that I’m most entertained by: meta-enabling.
Meta-enabling = writing about lowbrow things in a highbrow way to get the pageviews
without sacrificing the high-end ads or self-regard.
I’m not necessarily opposed to it, can often be used for good.
But I challenge anyone to think of a successful online start-up that doesn’t significantly rely on meta-enabling.

That’s it. The zen online news buddha has spoken and leaves us, small falling leaves lost in the wind, to decipher and discuss.

Andrew Golis' koans about Meta-enabling journalism

First, as a non-native English speaker, I turned to Steve to get the right meanings of highbrow and lowbrow. Highbrow means « intellectual », lowbrow means « popular », like in « pop-culture ». Second, the « meta » part doesn’t refer to the metadatas so useful for enhancing both your search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, but rather to the greek prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.

It involves a conscious consideration of the writing act over the final editorial product with the intention of highlighting the mechanism of writing in order to reveal the artificiality of the style, of the product, of the act of writing in itself.

Here it involves a conscious consideration of the writing act over the final editorial product with the intention of highlighting the mechanism of writing in order to reveal the artificiality of the style, of the product, of the act of writing in itself. Better said here when applied to blogging: « meta-enabling allows blogs to treat the way in which the posts are presented as the thesis of the post itself ».

If you think it’s not clear, try Roland Barthes.

French journalist Vincent Glad renamed meta-enabling journalism in « lol-journalism », turning the latter pejorative expression an old school colleague had used to qualify his work into a fully assumed journalistic method.

« lol » being the famous acronym for « laughing out loud » used in chats, forums, e-mails to express the locutor’s feeling of amusement, Vincent Glad defines the lol-journalist as the one who will maintain a constant level of lol (e.g. fun) in his articles. The lol-journalist walks on a thin editorial line framed by the seriousness of the subject and the seriousness of the angle. As Mr Glad explains, when covering the Greek crisis, the lol-journalist will favor an angle both entertaining and significant, such as the Greek fiscal administration discovering 16.976 swimming pools in a posh district of Athens, out of which only 324 were legally declared. On the other side of its thin editorial line, the lol-journalist will cover a trashy subject, say French soccer players having intercourse with an underage prostitute, under the angle of the media storm that exposed the escort girl in few hours thanks to the digital world we live in.

Here is a diagram, adapted from Mr Glad’s article, to illustrate the editorial concept.

lol-journalism is the blue line, always on the verge between serious and trashy journalisms (c) Vincent Glad

Meta-enabling journalism keeps the money coming.

The reason Andrew Golis states that no online business model can escape meta-enabling journalism comes from the fact this editorial genre is a source of traffic (hence an audience to sell to the advertisers) which keeps advertisers satisfied  and their brands safe from inappropriate content (there is always something serious, either the subject or the angle). Men being men, sex, gossip, and trash will be always favored to economics or politics. Maybe not by you, but by most of us. Yes, that makes you very special.

If you add intelligence in the most lowbrow subject (by being meta-enablingly smart and choosing an highbrow editorial angle for the story you’re writing) – the opposite achieving a similar result (covering a very serious subject with a very funny angle) – then you keep your content valuable and, as advertisers like to say, « qualitative ». Being qualitative is superior to being quantitative, as every bad looking guy would tell you. Of course, the best remains quality in quantity – which is brought by meta-enabling journalism.

Meta-enabling journalism works better if it’s part of an editorial mix rather than a 100% principle of production. It’s an interesting editorial way to bring attention to your website – and possibly to your more classical production.

The Gawker media group, which owns and runs the topical websites Gawker.com, Gizmodo.com, Kotaku.com, Jezebel.com, io9.com and lifehacker.com, is an obvious adept of meta-enabling journalism. Incidentally, the journalists’ salaries are correlated with the number of clics their articles get. It’s well possible you wouldn’t find their main topics serious enough. If you’re not into science-fiction, you may frown upon io9. Seriousness, just like beauty, belongs to the eyes of the beholder. Nevertheless, those websites are quite smart in their mix of the two editorial possibilities offered by meta-enabling journalism, hence satisfying a range of audience from the slightly interested casual reader (who would be caught by the angle) to the deep hard-core fan (who takes his subject very seriously but likes fun reading).

Of course, meta-enabling journalism works better if it’s part of an editorial mix rather than a 100% principle of production. It’s an interesting editorial way to bring attention to your website – and possibly to your more classical production.

As explained, meta-enabling is a tiny editorial line to follow and doesn’t concern all forms of entertainment writing. I personally find that the very appreciated TV RECAP (almost a new genre in itself) praised by The Awl don’t belong to this model.

Could it work for a European institution?

Meta-enabling journalism drives audience and I swear we’d love our main website to become more mainstream. When addressing the general public in our stories, the editors invest energy and talent in their writings to produce as clear and interesting content as our editorial strategy allows them to. This is far from being easy, as discussed many times on this blog.

First, by essence, the subjects we cover are almost exclusively super serious. Like in « democracy », « law making », « ruling the world » serious.

Spicing up our editorial mix with a bit of meta-enabling journalism could certainly bring new readers and sell some subjects better. It could also project a new light on the work, the actors, the influence of the European Parliament.

However, many obstacles prevent us to actually use this editorial model. First, by essence, the subjects we cover are almost exclusively super serious. Like in « democracy », « law making », « ruling the world » serious. The lol culture has not exactly reached our institution nor the people we work with (and for). Men in grey suits wearing ties in blue meeting rooms – not exactly your Mad Men atmosphere. We did publish lighter stories and we do try to produce more of them. We wrote about MEPs’ superstitions, their recommendations for Valentine’s Day, their Easter traditions. But none of those pieces could claim belonging to meta-enabling journalism.

The reasons those as-entertaining-as-we-can-afford stories have kind of faded away from our weekly editorial schedule are to be found in the extended powers of the European Parliament, with an increasing number of important subjects it is our duty to report on, and also our new social-media platforms. The tonality we can use on Facebook is certainly closer to « fun » and is less costly (in terms of resources and time) to produce.

As we ALL have experienced, people can’t tell when a regularly ironic person is being serious.

Another obstacle, very well spotted by The Awl, is the real nature of meta-enabling journalism: this is just a sophisticated form of irony adapted to our digital era, the « hallmark of our ironic, sarcastic, I-can’t-actually-tell-what-you-really-mean age and it *is* causing a problem. (…) As we ALL have experienced, people can’t tell when a regurarly ironic person is being serious. »

Irony doesn’t belong to our box of editorial pencils. Remember all our bragging about objectivity, accuracy, political balance? Right, they don’t match well with irony. EU affairs are complicated enough for our Latvian grandmother that we don’t add the mist of ironic writing. That wouldn’t help. Only insiders, EU Geeks and a happy few from the Brussels bubble would possibly get it.

Last but not least, the meta-enabling journalism is an author-oriented editorial genre. The virtuosity and skills of the writer make all the difference here. The genre satisfied perhaps more the writer than the readers. As civil servants, we are of course quite involved in our work. And we don’t hesitate to be proud of it but we also cultivate a significant self-discretion. The EP and the MEPs prevail. We don’t write for ourselves but for the general public. We don’t sign our stories.

Meta-enabling journalism, which I personally find extremely interesting and entertaining (when properly done) will have to be kept at bay from our editorial strategy. We’ll leave it to the first circle of EU followers and writers, who are in a better position than ours to fully take advantage of it.

And, well, we can always resort to it on this blog.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Tentative de définition du journalisme lol by Vincent Glad on BienBienBien
On Meta-Enabling: A Treatise by The ##
Are You a Chronic Meta-Enabler? by Choire on the Awl.

Down - but certainly not out

How can one communicate what poverty is like? That may sound like a trite question for those who experience it first hand. Perhaps we could emulate George Orwell and take to the kitchens, streets and mines in Paris and London and Wigan and experience grinding poverty first hand. I imagine it would be quite a shock to anyone born after the creation of the welfare state, health service and safety at work regulations.

I raise this point as we are now almost half way through the “European year for combating poverty and social exclusion” and I chanced upon some video diaries made during a conference on “Poverty between reality and perceptions” in October last year in Brussels.

In it a series of policy makers and journalists talk about ways of raising the awareness of poverty in Europe and also how it manifests itself in other “stories”. I was quite struck by the comments of BBC Northern Ireland correspondent William Crawley who pointed out that often what can lies behind racism, violence, school drop outs, unemployment and family break-up is poverty. He urged people to look a bit closer at the origins of many of our problems and suggested that perhaps we may find poverty as a cause.

There are believed to be around 85 million people living in poverty in the European Union – a staggering amount given the resources Europe has on offer. This figure has grown due to the economic crisis. Add to this the millions “at risk of poverty” (those who earn less than 60% of the average of other people in society) and the fear of unemployment and it makes for a bleak state of affairs. In an article in February we tackled a few of the ways of defining what poverty really is.

I think this should also prompt us to delve a bit closer into the background of issues and stories that we publish on the site. Perhaps sometimes we are not doing something – or more importantly the people affected by it – justice.

Last week a group of people experiencing poverty met at the European Parliament for the 9th time. Many Euro MPs from across the House have taken up the fight against poverty and exclusion and are looking for ways to create jobs and increase incomes. A recent report in the Employment and Social Affairs Committee on the prospect of a minimum wage generated a lot of debate on how best to help people – more social protection (in a time of huge public debt) or more work schemes and incentives. Or a mixture of both in fact. Unsurprisingly, the preference in Parliament reflects  left-right political orientation.

In addition to these MEPs earlier this year backed a report that seeks to help the disabled by making disability a legal one and a question of human rights. This step, though it may sound legalistic, is intended to make it easier for Europe’s 50 million disabled to access health care, the job market and other essential services.

Let’s hope that the crisis steadily becomes alleviated and the initiatives taken lead to a steady improvement in the position of so many of our fellow citizens over the coming months and years.

I’m honoured to work at this project, and I want to invest myself to make it bigger, nicer, and more powerful. It is a lab of experimentation and creativity, as it tests the potential (and pushes the limits) of institutional communication. Nowhere else, as far as I know, there is a community from so many different countries discussing political issues among them.  I was literally touched by the post on Thailand, when we talked about the riots in Bangkok. Some Thai people commented on it and many, many Europeans expressed them their solidarity and their sorrow, but also discussed the political situation there.

With over 76.000 fans, each post seen at least 100.000 times, and over 1.000 interactions per week, I think we shouldn’t be shy and say that this is one of the most successful experiences of communication on EU affairs ever.

Football time: the genius of Fred "en jouant avec son 'toshop"

Positive feed-back

In fact, we don’t need to auto celebrate ourselves, because we have a lot of positive feed-back, from inside and outside the House.

The other EU Institutions consider us frontrunners, and want to exchange experiences. The last example: a communication officer from EuropeAid at the Commission said he is “a big fan of the Facebook editorial team of the Parliament” and he would like to share with us some best practices.

After the chat with Heidi Hautala on human rights on Facebook, her assistant wrote to me that the results were “very impressive” and that the MEP “was very happy to participate and would do it again for sure :)”, encouraging us to “continue the excellent work!”.

FB fans appreciate our work, and they expressed it many times. Just over the last week, Marcello Toni thanked us for organising the chats, Tremopoulos Michalis encouraged us to “keep up the good work!!”and Mark Valdam said he likes “funny organisations like the EP :-))”.
…and some secrets to reveal
So far so good. Of course we can do much better, and I’ll write another post on what we can and should do in the future. For the time being, just two little confessions.
1) It is a serious thing – When “the pillar” left, I didn’t sleep for one week. I was given more or less informally the responsibility of coordinating the magic Facebook team, and this gave me a good dose of stress. The page took off and grew thanks – among others – to the creativity, restless effort and “geekiness” of Christian. I don’t know if I can keep up, but I will do all my best because I believe that this communication platform has a great potential to get Europe a little bit closer to citizens, but also to get citizens closer to European decision makers, and maybe most important, to get Europeans closer to each other.
2) But you don’t have to take yourself (and the others) too seriously. Do you know how the best posts that we publish see the light? Normally we exchange tonnes of emails, and at some point somebody comes up with a funny, sometimes hilarious email, that the others – crazily enough – take seriously. And then it goes on Facebook and gets a lot of comments and “likes”: the magic of Facebook!

For me, the important thing is to keep this spirit alive and…enjoy your work!

Is he our new guru?

The meeting was, in my opinion, very interesting since the guy knew very well what he was talking about and gave straight answers to the questions we brought up – even if he was perhaps a tad less unambiguous on privacy issues. But I won’t blame him, he was representing his company, was up front about that and we shouldn’t forget it. He gave useful insights on how Facebook is going to develop, what other institutions do and what we, the European Parliament, could do to improve our Facebook-presence.

I picked up some facts and statistics to give an overview of where we stand in the Facebook-galaxy (some of them come from our boss, Steve).

I was sitting next to Fred, our graphist, during the meeting... This is the way he takes notes. Well, my notes are so boring compared to that...

We can be proud of what we do on social media, for sure:

• As far as we can tell, the European Parliament is Europe’s highest ranking public political institution on Facebook
• The European Parliament page brings together the largest online community interested in EU politics – the second one being an unofficial EU page with about 43 000 fans.
• In the world rankings of public political institutions on Facebook, the European Parliament seems to be second only to the White House
• The European Parliament is the indisputable world leader in the use of Facebook by a parliamentary institution

But, nevertheless, we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too much and forget going on… because our 75 000 fans are nothing compared too:

• 272 000 on the Democracy UK page, which was launched to debate political issues at a national level.
• 455 000 fans/friends of all MEPs on Facebook (It’s even probably more than 500 000 now)
• 9.3 millions fans for Obama
• 9.6 millions fans for Lady Gaga
• 400 million Facebook users worldwide
• 500 million EU citizens
• 500 billion minutes spent on Facebook every month in the world

So, how to write for the EP web then? How to reach citizens, how to explain them what is happening here without boring them or making them google three out of each four words? That was what I wondered about before joining the team as a trainee. “Well”, I thought, “we can presuppose that people checking the EP web are already familiar to EU working so, it will be a difficult task, but not impossible”.

However, to my astonishment, on my first day here, I was told that we have to write in such an easygoing way that my Latvian grandmother could understand everything! Imagine my face, taking into account that I come from such an “indifferent-to-Brussels” country as Spain, where most of people do not even know who Barroso and Buzek are!

And that is where Web Unit job lies. Have we achieved this objective? Honestly, I still do not know, but at least we try. Maybe one day we should check it. Do you think my Castilian grandfather will understand my next text about the Swift agreement? Bets are accepted!