GUEST BLOGGER: Today is a big day in the life of the ep-webeditors blog. Nay, a rite of passage, a coming of age, an arrival in the sunlit uplands of Parliament bloggerdom. Today, our big boss, Jaume, Director and EP official spokesman, no less, appears for the first time on this blog. What’s more, he wants to talk about us! I read words like: “mischievious”, “smurfs”, “irresponsible” – but I’m reading nothing into it! Anyway, as they say, we are honoured to welcome onto our humble stage… The Director.

Keeping up without being killed in the attempt

One of the scariest moments in the professional life of the European Parliament’s Media Director comes when the people in charge of the Web Communication team storm in his office with the faces of mischievous children and a folder marked “new project” under their arms. It could be anything ranging from some doubtless vital overhaul of the website’s on line archives to the appearance on his desk of a group of strange blue-and-yellow little dolls resembling overweight smurfs that answer to the cryptic name of “YaBs”.

When the Director is introduced to a new internet project is a double test for him. Firstly, in relation to his capability or incapability to understand what the topic is. The Director is aware that he needs to understand at least one out of every three concepts and avoid letting his facial expression unmask his enormous ongoing neuronal effort.

Nevertheless the Director soon developed the conviction that a poor knowledge of the topic in question is often an advantage when it comes to proposing solutions which are acceptable for all the parties involved.

Secondly, because he will feel obliged to decide where to set the limits when it comes to accepting undoubtedly attractive proposals that however do not always reflect the degree of seriousness required of institutions such as the European Parliament.

The famous T-Shirts for the new website's launch

With regard to the first challenge, the Director is already the lucky survivor of a similar experience when, some years ago, he supervised the construction of a new press room full of electronic gizmos, hardware and software. Sounding intelligent in permanent discussion with audiovisual technicians, IT experts, architects and representatives of the press is not something you generally learn in any prestigious European Academy, nor would this ability be requested in a European Personnel selection competition.

Nevertheless the Director soon developed the conviction that a poor knowledge of the topic in question is often an advantage when it comes to proposing solutions which are acceptable for all the parties involved.

The second challenge is much more complicated because web teams, following their instinct and their duty, are continuously proposing tools that in most cases have “just arrived from the other side of the Atlantic” and which haven’t quite been used yet in institutional communication, let alone in Parliamentary communication. The Director will find himself quickly trapped between a rock and a hard place. The rock being those who rightly think that we have to adapt to new times – “Boss, Obama is doing this” – and the hard place being our hierarchy in the Parliament who do not necessarily accept ipso facto,the use of tools that don’t seem to correspond, a priori, to the solemnity of the Parliament.

Back in time it all started with something as innocent as overseeing the redesign of the main website so that it paid more attention to the ordinary citizen and less to European experts. But then it was about launching the new website surrounded by people in black t-shirts with surreal messages on them such as “A hemicycle is not half a bike”, or as militant as “Who cares for Europe? I do”.

In less than five years the way the European Parliament communicates has dramatically changed. It has become more modern, more accessible and more plural. Probably more coherent as well. But there is still a lot to be done and to be improved, especially if we don’t want to miss the train of the internet – one that resembles a Japanese bullet train.

Next came the production of audiovisual content (“Why should a Parliament be able to send press releases but not videos?”), or organising chats with the Parliament’s President. Later, taking advantage of the everything-is-possible principle of the European elections, a (partial) transition to full Web 2.0 interactivity took place. The Parliament explored social networks, blogs, wikipedia, online questions and debates. It also had viral campaigns with hysterical girls and gregarious cyclists and the use of all kinds of multimedia platforms. The majority of these instruments have demonstrated that they are valid and, after the elections, have been integrated with almost no discussion in the spectrum of the communication services of the Parliament.

In less than five years the way the European Parliament communicates has dramatically changed. It has become more modern, more accessible and more plural. Probably more coherent as well. But there is still a lot to be done and to be improved, especially if we don’t want to miss the train of the internet – one that resembles a Japanese bullet train.

Don’t worry. One of these days the Director’s desk will be filled once more with strange projects and his screen with intriguing slideshows. All the while, several expectant eyes in his office will try to guess from his face if he understands anything of what he sees, if he likes what he sees – and if he will be irresponsible enough to accept it.

But next time I will tell them the truth, I promise.

It's difficult to find new challenges after the elections... Photo by Koshyk on Flickr

And now? What’s next? After the tension of the election night (“Here are the first results! Tweeeeeeeeeeeet please! Asap!”), we’re coming in what I call a “post-electoral depression”. Nothing matters any more. Day-to-day work seems quite boring. What’s the aim of the articles we write, if not to increase the turnout in the elections?

On top of that, after having been in the “centre of the world” – or the “centre of Europe”, with hundreds of thousands of visits (i.e. readers) each day, nobody cares about us now. The stats are going down. We will become anonymous again on the web. No banner campaign, no Google adwords. Well, is that strange to be a normal citizen, waking up each morning for going to work instead of changing the world!

Retrospectively, overmotivation is probably dangerous. We should now wait five years until we can experience again an electoral campaign. For the time being, I will go on holidays. Just to forget a little bit the work, just to remind me that there are some wonderful things in the world which have nothing to do with my job. And when I will come back, I will be highly motivated for the next challenges. Because fortunately, we will find new goals, new projects, new deadlines … La vie est un éternel recommencement, en somme…

Of course, the communications machine goes into overdrive, whipping up interest from the press, organising the show itself and so on. But for the WebCom team, this is first and foremost our annual rendezvous with celebrity culture. The Energy Globe people must have connections because they get seriously big names along to their show. Glitz was provided this year by Canadian singer Alanis Morrissette (who sang her new single), Italian pop star Zucchero (whose after-show concert blew away a few cobwebs), music legend Dionne Warwick, a real American diva, and Bollywood star Aamir Khan, in terms of numbers of fans in the world probably the biggest celeb of the night, as well as being one who made a lasting impression on some of my female colleagues.

Political gravitas was not missing either among the guests, with Kofi Annan in attendance, along with former Indian environment minister (and famously named) Maneka Gandhi, who chaired the jury, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the team, we share out the celebs between us for the purpose of interviews. There was some jockeying for who gets whom, of course, but one assignment was clear from the start. There are two Russian speakers on the team, my Latvian colleague and me, so we got the Gorbachev job.

In the western half of Europe, there’s no question that Gorby (as they say) is a star, a hero of the eighties, the man who ended the Cold War and freed the world from communism and at least temporarily “ended history”. For people like me and my colleague, who grew up when our countries were still part of the Soviet Union, things are perhaps a little more nuanced… This was the last leader of the empire which had absorbed our countries, the figurehead of the system which had forcibly schooled us to be good Marxist-Leninists and a man who, for all the change he brought about, believed both in communism and the USSR. Still, I was fascinated to meet him and get my own impression of such a huge historical figure first hand, even if I would not be able to ask the question I would really have liked to ask – was it him who sent the tanks into Vilnius in January 1991?

Seeing Gorbachev close up mixed impressions of the surprising and the familiar. He’s aged obviously, and is in many ways surprisingly ordinary-looking, the quintessential elderly small round man. But then there’s that famous birthmark. It’s an icon, seen on a thousand TV news programmes from the eighties, evocative of an entire era of world politics and historic change. I couldn’t help thinking about how improbable it would once have seemed that I, as a junior Soviet citizen from the periphery of the empire, would one day be sitting in Brussels waiting to interview this man.

Getting the great man into a room for the interview was itself no mean feat. The press pack were in a scrum, officially denominated a queue, at the door and Gorbachev himself did not seem over enthusiastic at the prospect of probable hours in their company. Indeed, to be honest, he seemed downright grumpy about the whole thing, irritated by the TV lights, annoyed by having to work through interpreters, generally disturbed by all the kafuffle. We had host privileges, and were second only to Energy Globe’s own TV team, who seemed to take an age over their interview, with Gorbachev growing visibly more frustrated and curmudgeonly by the minute.

So when it came round to us, we were ourselves in a state of trepidation, not improved by not-very-restrained mutterings from the assembled journos outside the door about being kept waiting by the organisers of the show. We needn’t have worried. It was the Russian that did it. Halfway through the first sentence he was smiling, leaning forward, delighted to speak his own language and tell a couple of Baltic kids what he thought about the next generation of world politicians who had blown the legacy of his. After the politically correct discourse we so often hear in our work, it was refreshing to hear him having a go, and revel in the re-emergence of Russia after what he called the “doormat” years of the Yeltsin era. Just as unexpectedly, he joshed us about our slightly rusty Russian and even – a bit flirtatiously? – suggested to my colleague that she should address the issue by getting herself a Russian boyfriend.

Then it was over, we were out, the scrum were in. It was something to meet Gorbachev, and even if I didn’t get to ask about the tanks in Vilnius, it’s something to tell the grandkids, isn’t it?

You can read our interview here.

Links:

Feature on Energy Globe Awards: including all interviews

EP Website latest news page

Energy Globe website

Gorbachev Foundation website – Energy Globe entry