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

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?

It’s perfect internet material: short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and, yes, a fair hormonal charge. Here it is:

“Look at your man, now back to me, now back to your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me.”

Actually, I’m a little worried. I showed this to my wife yesterday and I’m convinced she’s watched it 146 times since then – and she’s still laughing! She may actually have watched the other one I showed her more often. This is the previous commercial from March, featuring “the man your man could smell like”, this one approaching 12 million views on YouTube. (Maybe I’m getting Old Spice for Christmas.)

You know you want to watch it. Here it is:

Now, I’m not Tayebot, and I’m not sure I can theorise satisfactorily about how this works in advertising terms. But I can spend a harmless few minutes wondering whether we have anything to learn from this.

Well, yes. Be short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and, yes, pack a fair hormonal charge.

Be short, smart, witty, self-ironic, a bit oddball, loaded with wow! effects and pack a fair hormonal charge

Not on a horse

And then get a budget to do something like this… I can’t track down a figure for the single videos, the best I can find is a media blog reporting that Old Spice advertising to June in 2010 cost 20 million dollars, the equivalent of 2/3 of its whole 2009 advertising budget. Sigh! We can only dream.

However, there is one interesting thing we can relate to in these advertisements: they (the first at least) are NOT loaded with computer-generated effects. Take my word for it, or watch this “making of” programme. It was done in one shot, with just a little photoshop-style tidying-up afterwards. Just like our lipdub. Yeah, right…

(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.

The rebranding, proposed by Jay Rosen – a press critic, a writer and a professor of journalism at New-York University – satisfied the mainstream editorial geeks. Still, you can find on the web enough of endless lexical discussions about citizen journalism by editorial über-geeks. That’s the thing with editorial people: they love to debate the terms. I’d like to keep this post short, so you can judge by yourself on Wikipedia or on newassignment.net. I call it the Oxford comma syndrome.

Edit: In a comment left on this, Mr Jay Rosen said he “never proposed re-branding citizen journalism as networked journalism” and stated I made up this rebranding. This is true, of course. I had (and still have) the impression that the “citizen journalism” concept lost kind of its appeal after being discussed and criticized by the media corporations and the professional journalists. From “When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism” (definition by Jay Rosen) the concept evolved to network journalism (where citizen and journalists co-produce news).

Mr Nobody wants its 15 retweets of glory

With the Internet, journalists and media people discovered that Mr Nobody not only had something to say about almost everything but that he could do it online, easily and for few pennies. Worse, Mr Nobody could even express himself about what established media were publishing or broadcasting, to the point where it challenged the well balanced order between those-in-the-know and the rest of the world. Well, the rest of the world can now take the floor.

« Citizen journalism », as an editorial concept, opposed « quality journalism ». The latter, as explained by Charlie Beckett, « was for quality people: educated, opinionated, influential, responsible, concerned and powerful. (…) It was different in production, style and above all, subjects and story selection. It was more expensive and expansive, but it was defined primarily by its self-conscious intelligence and its concerns with identifying and arbitrating the exercise of power. »

In the early ages of « citizen journalism », a certain taste of revenge could be discerned against The Media. If not the power, at least the news would be given back to the people. It would be all about who would write it first and tell the truth, the one that The Media did not want you to know. And, in some aspects, it happened.

A possible vision of The Media (c)Micah Wright

Then, came the joke about the « citizen dentist ». Then, more and more journalists discovered they could blog too (and that it was good fun). Oh, and suddenly newspapers started to disappear – or to lose tremendous amount of money, editorial staff were compressed, TV channels discovered erosion in their audience curves – all of this was Internet’s fault. Even the decrease in car sales is attributed to the Internet. Hackers download their cars via BitTorrent, I am told.

Smart news organizations got the hint they could well leave a (virtual) seat in their newsroom to all those Nobodies out there. I’d be harsh if I compared it to the empty chair my family left at the Christmas table for the occasional homeless guy bold enough to knock at our door and be invited to join the feast (he never showed up) but it does echo, doesn’t it? If that was a timid start, it went further. Nowadays, writes Charlie Beckett in the Guardian, networked journalism « takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism: professional and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other accross brands and old boundaries to share facts, answers, ideas, perpectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make the news. And it focuses more on the process than on the product. »

The first aspect of networked journalism is, therefore, to publish under the brand umbrella of a news organization some blogs written by non-journalists (as well as by journalists from the organization). This single co-existence of products of different nature is enough to raise infinite debate about role, advantages, qualities and flaws of contemporary journalists versus bloggers. Not to mention the famous « win-fuck » deal under which most of agreements between bloggers and medias were concluded: the former work and write to be published on a famous news website in exchange for visibility and notoriety. I’ll let you guess who’s the winner.

It’s not about the product, it’s about the process

More interesting to me is this co-production process where non-journalists and journalist work together on a story – whatever the final product might be (a text, a video, a multimedia). Of course, media have not discovered only yesterday they could use people as sources. For every major far away catastrophy, magazines were buying amateur photographs or video footage. As Frédéric Filloux phrases it, « today Twitter has replaced the checkbook ».

Rue89 and Mediapart are two French news websites built on this editorial model, amongst many others. Some major news organizations have added the network journalism model into their mix. « This is the idea that traditional journalism opens itself up to the public » explains Charlie Beckett. « It uses new technologies to include the citizen in every aspect of news -gathering, production and publication. It means using a lot of jargon like crowd-sourcing, social networking, wikis and Twittering. » This is considered by some as a revolution. « That means, adds Mr Beckett, that journalists must accept that they can no longer be the privileged gatekeepers to information nor the sole arbiters of editorial judgement. »

To be honest, as a casual user, I haven’t really noticed the difference when reading the final products. Maybe because the new process works so well you don’t feel the difference. Who cares how many cooks elaborated the risotto as long as it tastes good? Or, possibly, I trust the brand and that’s enough. I read New York Time stories because I trust the New York Time. They have a tremendous fact checking system, they are a reference in the media landscape (and yet, they’re losing money), I like their style. And I read bloggers as well, with different expectations, as noble as the ones leading me to NYT, delivering me a similar yet different pleasure.

Although, networked journalism is used a lot for covering local news, especially in the USA and in the UK. Networks of « hyperlocal » journalists are set up and partnerships created, as Jemina Kiss and Heather Christie tell in Citizen journalism: can small be bountiful?

I must admit I don’t care the slightest for local news. Possibly because I live in Brussels, possibly because I was raised in the countryside where anonymity was at best a dream.  My field is the world, not my street corner.

For news corporations, perhaps in an attempt to help their staff swallow the bitter pill, networked journalism is more critical than a single production process. It is « both a business model and a practical strategy to secure the future of journalism and its freedom » concludes Mr Beckett. He goes further in another article: « anyone seeking to sustain freedom of expression should seek to build networked journalism ».

Wait – should we feel concerned?

We can proudly say we practiced network journalism in two occasion on the European Parliament website. When we handed over the Headlines keys to the young journalists during European Youth Media Day – a fun, tremendous, exhausting experience if you’d ask me. And when we proposed to our audience to send their photos to illustrate a story scheduled in advance. The photographer whose work we appreciated the most was invited to Strasbourg where he could cover the session and propose a slideshow.

There are different obstacles to get over before we can really integrate such a process in our editorial workflow. You may not agree with the importance of it, but, as civil servants, we are bound to respect the institutional Rules of conduct. Those are a good life line to ensure our editorial strategy introduced in a previous post.

Second, the real interest of network journalism lays in the multiple sourcing about an event. The thing is: most of what we cover takes place few hundred meters from where we sit. We don’t really need someone to twit us what an MEP has just said in a Committee meeting. We are watching it via the streaming. Or we have an editor there. Or a Press Attaché.

Of course, opinions, understandings, comments about the subject we report  expressed by external people (citizen, experts, journalists) would definitely add great value. I’m afraid we can’t follow this trail yet. As an institutional website, our role is to reflect a fair balanced view of MEPs’ opinions and decisions, as expressed by their speaches, their votes, their work. We are more located at the source of possible discussion between citizen and MEPs than at the heart of it – as an editorial news website.  We’d better let our visitors react and produce their own content rather than co-produce our stories with some of them.

This doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear the voice of the people – quite the contrary as our Facebook chats, comments and editorial policy hopefully demonstrate. And yes, we would like to bring this back to the flagship website. In a later post, I’ll try to expose the leads we’d like to follow for our new online digital strategy. Before that, there are still other editorial models that are interesting to have a look at.

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

Citizen journalism on Wikipedia

Network Journalism Versus Citizen Journalism Versus the Myriad of Other Names for Social Media in the News World

Press freedom: The public are now becoming partners with journalists in the production of news by Charlie Beckett (The Guardian)

An alternative term to the use of Citizen Journalism, proposed by Jay Rosen on P2P Foundation.

What Is Quality In Networked Journalism? by Charlie Beckett.

Editorial Diversity: Quality Networked Journalism by Charlie Beckett.

The Oxymoronic Citizen Journalism by Frédéric Filloux on Monday Note.

Citizen journalism: can small be bountiful?

Citizen journalists’ shine a light on their own communities (The Guardian)

"French Favorite" on EUTube

This is pretty up-front in the no. 1 all-time hit, with nearly eight million views, officially  entitled “Film lovers will love this!“, but better known, thanks to a UK tabloid press storm, as the Commission’s “porno” film. So much so that YouTube requires the viewer to confirm he/she is over 18 before allowing it to be seen.  However, sex appears in several other EUTube hits. The no. 2 video features a more romantic view of love, often drawing on the same films we see in the “porno” video. (The same video, with its concluding slogan in French, reappears at no. 6, retitled “French Favourite”. It’s probably vey British-tabloid of me to see the new title, combined with the couple a-bed thumbnail, as innuendo, but there you have it…).

The excellent “Chemical Party” video (no. 3) also has its dose of sexual chemistry, though here jokily and geekily, but after that we have to go down to no. 15 to find “Make love, not CO2“, which conclusively demonstrates that guys who ride bikes and buy sustainable flowers for their girlfriends are stand a better chance of a satisfactory conclusion to the evening than their less ecological brethren. This video does not go where the porno film goes, but it does, I note, feature attractive young bodies in baths and showers.

I note this because I see a common factor here – bathroom fittings. This post was in fact prompted by watching the video at no. 17 in the hit parade, “Imagine what you could do“, a video which had done the rounds in the office, but to which my attention was again drawn by an acquaintance working in the Commission department concerned, DG Enterprise.

This video, which does not hold back on the innuendo, features a sophisticated, sexy lady entering the men’s showers, where, accompanied by a sultry soundtrack and after shedding some clothes, she makes a beeline for the hunkiest of the hunks and… well, watch the video – I’d hate to spoil it for you. There is a twist, and it involves a small, foil-wrapped plastic item.

Somehow, the Commission brand doesn’t say “sex” to me

So why, apart from a desperate impulse to boost traffic to the blog by using the internet’s favourite search terms, do I bring all of this to your attention?

It’s really to ask a question: how well do sex and the Commission mix? In communications terms, I mean…

Somehow, the Commission brand doesn’t say “sex” to me. I would be amazed if there were anyone in the world who would spontaneously make that association. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Commission has a propensity for using sex to sell its policies. Actually, it probably doesn’t do so very much, but it has done so quite successfully on occasion. The mechanism, beyond the simple fact that sex has always worked in advertising, is probably the surprise/shock factor: “what? the Commission did THAT?” For an organisation which still apparently has cold feet about venturing onto Facebook, it seems a surprisingly bold strategy, probably illustrating (if I read the runes correctly) the fact that someone inside the Commission has taken to heart the adage “better to ask forgiveness than ask permission”.

But the nagging question still remains – is this the right way to go? Is it appropriate for an EU institution to sell its wares this way. Without wishing to sound prudish, I would have some hesitation in considering either the “porno” video or “Imagine what you could do” as suitable viewing for my pre-teenage offspring. And should a public institution be purveying adult-only ads?

I have to note in passing that the Commission is careful not to cross certain lines of political correctness. Different sexual orientations are represented, and there is a post-feminist aura about the women – these are not the girls gratuitously draped over the bonnets of fast cars beloved of seventies advertisers, but empowered twenty-first century women. Indeed, it transpires that the shower woman is no model, but the real thing, the young entrepreneur behind the foil-wrapped plastic thing. (A thing which, one notes, also serves an eminently politically correct purpose.)

Is the Commission onto something good, or is it’s brand-defying dabbling in steamy advertising techniques bound to end in tears?

All of which said, the shower-lady advert indisputably relies for its effect on one’s very adult imaginings of the reasons for which she gets close and low-down with a guy in a shower. I can’t imagine this being done by governmental communicators in many (at least non-Nordic) Member States, and I don’t see the European Parliament, for example decidedly less hung-up about Facebook, going that way either.

So it’s an open question, is the Commission onto something good here, or is it’s brand-defying dabbling in steamy advertising techniques somehow bound to end in tears?

Really, I’d be most interested to hear what people think.

Links are to Internet what potatoes and mushrooms are to Latvian gastronomy: its quintessential raison d’être. Links are gold and diamonds, structure and tools, brick and mortars. There are no links outside Internet and Internet doesn’t exist without links.

Hence the link journalism for which Wikipedia’s definition goes like this:

« Link Journalism, » a phrase coined by Scott Karp in 2008, is “a form of collaborative journalism in which a news story’s writer provides external links within the story to reporting or other sources on the web.” [5][6] These links are meant to complement, enhance, or add context to the original reporting. Jeff Jarvis, from the Graduate School of Journalism’s new media program at the City University of New York, has said that link journalism creates a « new architecture of news. »

“Publish what you chose to publish, link to the rest” – this is the motto of link journalism, a child concept of participative journalism. The idea behind it is to propose a constant flow of information from all possible sources, with the aim of quickly informing via short (also called micro) contents.

Twitter and link journalism are natural born fit. (c) Brian Lane Winfield Moore

Because this is an editorial concept, link journalism differs of its close parent: the automatic aggregation of news by powerful algorithms, à la « Google News » or provided by the living stories tool from Google Lab or even by Google Flip. Notably, link journalism doesn’t propose extract nor original content from the target it links to. It’s all about subjective selection. As Scott Karp phrases it :

“Algorithms can beat humans at comprehensive web search, but humans should be able to beat algorithms at news aggregation.”

Those robots, they’d link anything if you’d let them.

The dogma here states that information has become so abundant, one doesn’t need new information but rather some help to select and propose what is already available. And who could help better than the news professionals who are the journalists, if possibly all rallied behind an emblematic flag of seriousness and quality? The Washington Post believed in the concept so much it created a Political browser in 2008 (not updated since December 2009) to cover the American elections. By acting so, The Post provided a « stamp of approval » to a choice of stories.

« The Post believes, with good reasons, writes Scott Karp, that a lot of people who are interested in political news and in the Post’s political reporting would find it interesting to get « inside the heads » of Post journalists, to see what the are reading and what is informing their reporting. (…) Political browser is about the « news judgement » of Post journalists – and isn’t that, at the end of the day, what reporting and editing have always been about? »

This online editorial model is used by major news actors, from a single form (« editors choice » or « you may also like those » on media websites) to single publishing activity (aaaliens in France). In most of the cases, link journalism is part of the mix of any serious online publisher. But its share of the cake is growing.

A medium of choice for practicing link journalism is, of course, Twitter. I personally follow @Gamdel and his flock of morning link tweets and @florencedesruol who provides me with a constant flow of interesting links throughout the day. There are million of others just doing this. Outside of a formal media organization, link journalism provides journalists (and bloggers and anyone) with a fantastic opportunity to glaze their personal branding.

The strengths of the model

For news consumers, advantages are obvious. They can benefit from a constant review of the web proposed by journalists they trust. In our new Web 2.0 world, they can rate, comment, share all the links. They are not lost on the internet anymore and the flow of information is now manageable – thanks to the link journalists.

This editorial model serves transparency as well: everyone can access journalists’ sources and understand how they write their stories and where they get their information from.

It’s a double-trust bargain.

Journalists, therefore, turn themselves into “labellers” of information. It’s a double-trust bargain. The reader trusts the media in its selection of the most interesting available resources on the Internet and the media trusts the reader he’ll be smart enough to understand and digest the said resource without any further editing or writing from his part – except for a paragraph of comment coming with the link (the famous micro-content) which plays a teasing role.

And for the publishers? Well, live journalism is, somewhow, cheaper than traditional journalism. Less travel, less investigation. Less creativity, as well, in the choice of original angle to cover the same story everyone is running. Just a bunch of Internet-native journalists paired with a good algorithm and your content is produced. It’s also a great addition to their branding.

…and the weaknesses

If media practicing link journalism are your main source of information, you may feel sucked in a vaccuum of news in endless loop. Whatever happens at 17h03 will be sang ad lib by different medias sourcing the same news providers (usually press agencies or major medias) all at the same time, before the stream of pieces of news is replaced by what happens at 17h17. Some call it the « tyranny of urgency » in which the flow kills the context.

Some call it the « tyranny of urgency » in which the flow kills the context.

Similar grief can be heard from journalists. Not only don’t they feel comfortable with sharing their sources (the sources’ protection is a serious business), but they don’t consider this « import-export » kind of journalism (term coined by Bertrand Le Gendre from Le Monde) as real journalism. At best, it’s a nice evolution for librarians, if only they were not busy dusting off their books so Google can scan them.

By resigning their responsibiity to explain, put things in context, confront different points of view without repeating ad nauseam the facts, journalists feel less, well, journalists.

Also, the use of link journalism by media can become a good way to monetize its more expensive content which would only be available to subscribers – and not be linkable any more. The best content with the most added value would now cost something – the ultimate dream for any news providers and the nightmare for most of digital natives. What? To pay for news? Do me a favor, it’s free as birds.

The dark side expressed by link journalism sceptics forcecasts a new age of darkness for the Internet with no original content to link to anymore. Live by the links, die by the links and all that sort of thing.

Could it work for a EU Institution?

Like a consultant told us the other day, one of the gold mines on our website is our content. People would kill for it, he said – believe it or not. As I wrote in the first post of this series, to be a comprehensive gateway to resources of the website is part of our editorial model. Nevertheless, we tend to remain old-fashioned when it comes to our linking policy – we add them as useful complementary information at the bottom of our stories. We promote some of our content via Visuals and Ads on the top page. When there are long breaks, in summer or in Christmas time, we publish special dossiers providing a selection of the best articles we published in the last months, gathered together under subjective topics (Editors’ choice) or practical ones (Best interviews).

We also use our 22 Twitter profiles to link to stories we published or to interesting videos produced by our twin sister team, europarltv. And on this very blog, we use the Asides on the top page to, precisely, provide our readers with interesting links. (Those asides are mostly written by our talented Asta).

And that’s about it.

It would hurt our feelings to promote super good stories that may not fit with our editorial policy.

In the EU blogosphere, talented individuals do practice link journalism. Best example to pop up in my mind would be the Eurobloggers of the Blogging portal. When it comes to institutions, one flaw would be linking to external sources. You see, we’re having so much interesting content no one reads, it would hurt our feelings to promote super good stories that may not fit with our editorial policy. Also, if there is no shortage of interesting content about the European Parliament – or even the European Union, there is a lack of appealing ones, the kind that explains, illustrates, adds context and keys.

In short, the kind we are struggling to produce every day in 22 languages.

On the other hand, I see some space for link journalism applied to our own content (eg linking only to what’s published on our website). One of our main daily burden is, guess what, the time our editors spend writing when they could do so many other interesting things, like going into meeting to thrill at near-death-by-powerpoint-experiences. One possibility we are working on would imply publishing micro-contents on our home page and linking to more detailed documents or Press Releases. We would, of course, keep producing new kind of content I will describe in a coming post. But to add the link journalism model in our editorial mix in an efficient and helpful way, we would need more content to link to available in 22 languages. Press officers reading this post are already buying voodoo dolls to curse me: they see it coming and they don’t have time nor resources to produce everything they do in 22 languages.

If I am dubious about link journalism as the sole editorial production of any organization, I still believe it can spice up an editorial mix. We’ll keep this one on our radar.

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
Following articles were of a useful help when writing this post.
Wikipedia – link journalism
Journalisme de liens : le Washington Post s’y met – by narvic on novövision
washingtonpost.com’s Political Browser Uses the News Judgment of Journalists to Filter the Political Web – by Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0
The Political Browser on the Washington Post.
Réflexions en roue libre sur le journalisme de liens – by Samuel Laurent on Suivez le geek.
Google’s living stories
Google’s fast flip
Le Net informe mal, il embrouille – by Bertrand Le Gendre in Le Monde (no link, sorry).

Are social media reserved for young people? © European Parliament / Pietro Naj-Oleari

The use of social media has been very much discussed during the seminar. It shows that it has become unavoidable. I can remember another seminar about one year ago, when I arrived in the web communication team. It was very complicated to convince our colleagues from other units that social media are not a useless tool for a few geeks. Social media were just out of the debate – “Why should we discuss it, it has no power and the European Parliament doesn’t have anything to do with it!”

I wouldn’t say that the situation is 100% different today, but I see an improvement. People don’t question the use of social media any more – even if they still question their utility and outreach. In my opinion, it means that social media have become an integral part of the European Parliament’s communication toolbox. The work done during the elections campaign was fruitful. Some colleagues still don’t believe in what we do, but at least they accept that we do it and see it as a (minor) communication channel. The next step will be to convince them of the incredible power of social media.

Social media will never replace traditional communication methods. A good conclusion because everyone can understand what he/she wants to understand.

Social media: who's in favour, who's against? Vote during our directorate seminar. ©European Parliament / Pietro Naj-Oleari

Social media will never replace traditional communication methods, they’re just aside these. That was more or less the conclusion of the seminar. A good conclusion because everyone can understand what he/she wants to understand.

And I want to hear a positive sign in this conclusion. Our hierarchy doesn’t want to hurt our old-fashioned colleagues but they want us to keep going.

If young people are the future of Europe, then social media are very important – not only for the European Parliament or for communication purposes, but also for the sake of the European democracy. Because press releases, traditional websites, newspaper articles and open air events will never reach this particular audience at a European level. Is Facebook going to be the beginning of a true European public sphere? Let’s hope it will be the conclusion of next year’s seminar…