Here are the Eurobloggers

Bloggingportal.eu is celebrating its third anniversary tomorrow, 26 January 2012. The website brings together 904 blogs in the different languages of the EU, written by individuals, journalists, Members of the European Parliament, European Commissioners and many more. They are looking at the European Union from different angles, giving themselves a sectional, party-political, cultural or regional focus when they translate the mass of communication that comes out of the European institutions every day.

But why would you bother to write about this stuff if you don't even get paid for it? Here are some of the blogger profiles I have come across.

Blogger A

I am a journalist working for a national newspaper or an audiovisual media. I am caught between the political discussion in my member state and the discussions in the hallways of the European institutions in Brussels. My media asks me to translate what I hear in Brussels so that my home audience will understand it. But many of the ideas and solutions that I hear about in Brussels are not relevant for my home audience. I put them on my blog.

Blogger B

I am a professional working in the European institutions or a lobby group. In my daily life, I have a lot of meetings behind closed doors in which European politics is decided day by day. This strikes me as utterly undemocratic and I feel like I should do something about it. So I gave myself a pseudonym and am writing down some of my daily experiences and thoughts on my blog - in the hope that it will make these European institutions a little bit more transparent.

Blogger C

I study the European Union. My day involves reading scientific articles about the number of votes that are necessary in the Council of Ministers to get a piece of legislation adopted. My desire is to switch the side of the desk and become a part of this European world myself in the future. I feel fervently pro-European and take a lot of pain in the way that reality differs from my ideal model of a harmonic European Union. On my blog, I can say what I think about all this. Maybe someone will read it one day. Maybe they will offer me a job. 

Blogger D

I don't care about the European Union. All this institutional bla bla bla bores the crap out of me. I have my own agenda, what I care about is my personal freedom, freedom to travel, freedom to say what I think on the web, freedom to obtain the information that I want to get. But this freedom is in danger from a few grey hats in Brussels and some more grey hats in America, and that's why I am raising my voice. My voice is a mixture of well-placed needle pinches and indignant rioting. If one of those grey hats that I am talking to actually reads me blog, that's even the better. But quite frankly, I don't care.

Blogger E

My media team is handling my blog for me. They also handle my Twitter. Our media analysts told us that European citizens all start going online. We have tried press conference for a long time and even set up our own TV station, but we only get coverage when the EU is in trouble (granted, that happens a lot lately). My blog allows me to reach the citizens directly. I am providing my own voice, and I know that citizens appreciate this. I know that I could do more to interact with them, but I have business leaders and national politicians to meet as well. I am faithful that my media team is doing a good job, and they collect a good load of valuable feedback from the readers of my blog that I can use in my daily work.

MountEUlmypus post no. 100

I just realized that my previous post was MountEUlympus post no. 100. After two and a half years of writing about the EU, this blog is still here, and it is here to stay for a while. Just a few musings about EU blogging before I turn back to proper content in my next post.

It is a rewarding experience to blog about European affairs. The last 30 months in blogging have seen me challenged by Prof. Andrew Moravcsik, reprinted in the newspaper New Europe (New Europe pdf unavailable), responded to by development economist Ha Joon Chang, participate in the Th!nk about it 2 blogging competition on climate change, publish a bachelor thesis on the European blogosphere, become a co-editor of  Bloggingportal.eu, discover the workings of the Council of Ministers, cover the EPP Summit and many other experiences. Most of all, however, blogging has put me into an international community in which new ideas are put forward and debated every day and thereby significantly increased my knowledge of European affairs. 

As I said, it is a rewarding experience to be a blogger and I can only encourage every citizen reading this post to think about starting his or her own blog. Given that European politics are rarely debated in national public spheres, European debates frequently develop in the blogosphere from where they are sometimes upscaled to national media. Even though the European blogosphere might sometimes appear a little like the electronic version of the Brussel bubble, participation is open to everybody and new entrants are welcomed and listened to. Maybe you will be next?

II Youth Convention on Volunteering

On 8 September, the II Youth Convention on Volunteering kicks off. More than 1500 registered participants are expected in the European Parliament in Brussels and on the Esplanade in front of it from 8 to 11 September. Many more young people from Brussels and its surroundings will visit workshops, events, discussions and free concerts on the Parliament Esplanade from Thursday afternoon to Saturday evening.

For those based in Brussels, the Convention offers a great opportunity to find information about volunteering and volunteers' rights, to join workshops, events, discussions and free concerts and to meet young people from all over Europe.

Those outside of Brussels may be interested in following the live blog of the event. Over three days, a young blogger team (disclaimer: I am one of them) will follow events, discussions, workshops and concerts for online readers.

Hope to see you online or offline - at the II Youth Convention on Volunteering.

Monitoring and web communications toolkit

Due to requests from some friends, in this post I put together a toolkit for monitoring EU affairs and communicating via the web. Using Google, Delicious, Twitter and some intelligent research commands can cut your research time in half.

Beside subscribing to newsletters, the first thing you could do is to use RSS feeds. Jon Worth's post over here tells you why. RSS feeds are common for most news websites; once you've subscribed, you receive the latest news automatically. To read them, though, you will need a feed reader. There are a few out there, such as the Google Reader; see Jon's post for details. Tell me more

Second, create Google Alerts. This little program will crawl the web and send you emails as soon as a new item with your search terms goes online. If you created a daily alert for 'EU agriculture', for example, you will comfortably receive your search results pertaining to EU agriculture in your inbox, structured in news results, blog results and web results. Tell me more

Third, to save time during your research, you can use intelligent search commands (for Alerts or regular searches). Among the more interesting ones are searches within a particular website. The search command Obama site:nytimes.com will show you every mention of Barack (or Michelle) Obama on the New York Times. You can also look for "Barack Obama" site:nytimes.com and will only find mentions of the President himself. Tell me more

Fourth, to keep track of all that you read online, you could use delicious.com, a tool that allows you to create bookmarks. You can access these bookmarks from any computer, allowing you to quickly find online articles that you read before.



With your monitoring tools thus set up, there are also many means to publish and publicize content. The easiest form to publish content is a blog, while the easiest way to spread it is via Twitter. The EU is now very active on Twitter; you can find a list of EU twitter contacts over at La Communication Européenne.

When you have produced content on your blog, programs like Twitterfeed, Hoot Suite or RSS Graffiti allow you to publish it to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (could be very useful for those MEPs who stopped tweeting after the 2009 elections but who still maintain their websites). If you feel like it, create your own daily newspaper through paper.li. Google Analytics and other programs allow you to keep track of how many people visit your website. Be help of Feedburner, you can let readers subscribe to your website by email. Yahoo Pipes allows you to aggregate news feeds from several blogs or websites and even to translate them into other languages. I recently started using If this then that to combine different online tasks. I greatly love it, but it's still in beta phase and will evolve over time. To manage your Twitter account professionally and to quickly target new followers, you could use on of these programs, unfortunately none of them is free. Finally, to measure your online influence, have a look at klout.com.

While you're defining your target audience, don't forget to sign your website/blog up to several blog aggregators such as technorati.com or bloggingportal.eu. See more


In the end, however, getting readership is mainly about interaction. Reacting to blogposts and comments, retweeting other people's messages - this will draw a wider audience than if you only resort to automated publishing tools.


If you have other programs, blogpost links or ideas, please share them in the comments.

The Hungarian Presidency's legacy: Bloggers allowed in the Council

Today is the final day of the Hungarian EU Presidency. From tomorrow, Poland will set the agenda and organize Council meetings for the remainder of 2011.

It is not my place to judge the overall performance of the Hungarian Presidency, but in one aspect it deserves a lot of praise. It was the first Presidency to allow bloggers into the Council meetings. Several times, bloggers Ronny Patz, Europasionaria and Litterbasket (Joe Litobarski) have reported directly from the Council, and in a handful of meetings with Brussels-based bloggers, the Presidency has made the inner workings of the Council more transparent (see a comprehensive blogtour by Mathew Lowry here).

Although it would seem a basic principle of democracy to let citizens attend a Council and ask questions to their politicians, earlier attempts at transparency achieved one thing most of all: it allowed lobbyists to monopolize the floor. With social media taking a more important place in the European policy debate, the Council is trying to give a greater space to European bloggers. In future, the Council's deliberations go, citizen bloggers should be allowed to request access to Council meetings, but it has to be safeguarded that they don't wear a lobbyist's hat. Much is still under negotiation, but after the Hungarian Presidency paved the way, hopes are high that bloggers could more regularly report from the Council.

We hope the Polish Presidency will be prepared to continue the work started by its predecessor. And we are highly thankful for the efforts of Gergely Polner and Hajdú Márton who devoted time and energy to European social media during the HU Presidency.

Update (19/07/2011): See coloredopinions for an interesting discussion on Blogging as a Wheat and Chessboard Problem

MountEUlympus back in action

I've come home from China and will start blogging again. It's pretty exciting to come back just now, with the EU busy about the Hungarian Media Law, the Hungarian presidency, democracy in Italy and saving the Euro. Taken as a whole, 2010 has certainly been one of the EU's most challenging years since 1957.

The new year is always the time for new plans and new beginnings, so I will try to do some new things as well. First of all I'm honored to join the bloggingportal.eu editors. Hope that I can do some good things as an editor. To that effect, you can also add me on Twitter now. Secondly, I will give a new focus to my blogging. Sure, I'm still writing about institutional affairs and current EU events. But I want to pursue a few topical issues as well.

The most important one is China. We don't know anything about this new world power. And the way it is, we are headed into a clash of cultures between "the West" and China. In my blogging, I will take up issues that China talks about and take up EU-China questions, trying to avoid the conventional bias of our media. The question is, how can "the West" and China be reconciled? How can the faultlines be mended? Where does assimilation take place, in China or in "the West"? Obviously, talking about "the West" will not be limited to the EU but essentially incorporate the US as well...

The second aspect is the global economy. This will be a learning-by-doing experience, as my knowledge about international trade flow and finance only stems from a bachelor's degree. Together with the global economy, I also want to explore questions of sustainable development in the world.

The final aspect is event journalism. I will move into the Brussels bubble in a bit and try to cover some European Councils, press conferences and what else seems of interest to me and to you. Depending on the opportunities I get, I'm also going to play with my video camera and try to interview some of the people that keep the wheels spinning in Brussels.

At any rate, this is an exciting time to recommence blogging. After the #EUCO tweet wall event, I expect that we'll have to negotiate how blogging and bloggers can be incorporated into EU policy-shaping in the future.

Glad to start this new year together with you. I'm looking forward to a lot of fruitful interaction and debates.


P.S. if you're too busy to check this website for updates, how about copying its RSS feed into your feed reader?

Accountability through the media - what is the value of science?

Two publications of political science that I recently had on my desk made me wonder where science stops and where investigative journalism begins - or vice versa.

In the first article "The Quint", Catherine Gegout investigates the secretive decision-making of Germany, France, the UK, Italy and the US in an informal working group before 2002. The group took decisions and more or less imposed them on the other Member States in the Council of Ministers without the possibility of them participating. Gegout interviewed multiple members of national bureaucracies under cover of anonymity and could slowly make sense of the informal body that Germany, France and the UK did not acknowledge at all and Italy and the US only mentioned in passing on the national websites.

The second article is Gijs Jan Brandsma's PhD thesis "Backstage Europe" in which the Dutch researcher brings light into the secretive comitology system of the European Union. National representatives are often not held accountable for decisions and yet they have a wide discretion in their actions:

(W)ithin only a few minutes the committee rushes through five official votes related to the points discussed before lunch, and the meeting closes instantly. Then Van Veen [name replaced] turns to me and smiles: ‘You saw that? We just spent 50 million here’ (p. 29).

Like Gegout, Brandsma based his research on personal interviews with decision-makers in national bureaucracies - under the cover of anonymity.

For me, these two papers provide a check on decision-makers in the way in which investigative journalism puts a check on them. But they are published in a scientific journal and will only reach the academic community and a few students. In consequence, this check is confined to an elite community. Will any policy changes result from these articles? Is that the intention of the scientist? Does he intend to saw the chair of a decision-maker, or does he see himself as the person providing the saw? And if he wants to actively saw, do policy-makers feel more threatened by revolting scientists than by revolting masses (i.e. classical journalism)?

You could argue that an important function of the European blogosphere is to find the little flaws in European policy-making which slip through the filter of the MSM, thereby providing an additional check on policy-makers. Science has the resources to provide the same.

But it is not enough to debate hot scientific findings in the scientific community. In the interest of public accountability, I would like those discussions to reach the media and the blogging community as well.


Update (30 January 2011): Don't miss the interesting take on the topic by Kosmopolito. And his add-on published here (3 March 2011).

Is the German public sphere Europeanizing?

The online portal tagesschau.de is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive and most-consulted online media for Germans. For readers in and outside the country, the website is one of the crucial actors in the German public sphere. In his daily German-language European review Politikportal, for example, Stefan Happer regularly refers to tagesschau.de as one of the most trusted and most prominent sources. Furthermore, the website has started to involve common citizens by allowing for comments (after subscribing, however).

Over the last few months, I had the impression that this important actor of the German public sphere has gradually developed a more and more European and international stance. Since a medium only changes its focus as long as the news are continuously read, I take this as a sign that the German public discussion as a whole is becoming more Europeanized and internationalized. A few years ago, Stefanie Sifft still found a "predominantly domestic orientation of public discourses" in the Member States (see here).

Now I counted the number of European articles on tagesschau.de (Sunday, 28. February, 2 p.m. CET). Besides the earthquake in Chile, I don't have the impression that there are a lot of highly-relevant international topics, so it might well be an example for an average day in Germany.

I counted:

• 20 articles overall (only counting major articles, not those that support another one)
  
• six articles with non-German, non-European actors
• four articles with non-German, European actors
• one article with German actors abroad
• seven articles with purely domestic issues

For me, this is a sign that public interest in Germany is growing beyond the domestic focus that Stefanie Sifft diagnosed in 2007 in "Segmented Europeanization". Globalization finally seems to reach the common people in every aspect of their lives.

After a disappointing campaign for the European Parliament Elections last year, I have the hope that we are slowly moving towards Europeanized national public spheres, even if it will take a long time until a truly European public sphere reaches the common people.

French blogosphere organizing a No Sarkozy Day on March 20th 2010

The French press hasn't picked it up yet, the Italians were quicker. This article was in La Repubblica yesterday. After the success of No Berlusconi Day in Italy, organized through Facebook, French bloggers are up to do the same.
Their actions were less successful when they tried to mobilize people against the candidacy of Sarkozy's son Jean for the principal administrator of business district "La Défense". Yet, after public outrage was voiced through the media over weeks, Jean Sarkozy decided to drop his candidacy.

All the best to the French bloggers in organizing the protests! As the country with the biggest demonstration culture in Europe, France should be able to pull off a decent protest on March 20th.

Flip HD Camera and citizen journalism

For the Th!nk2 about it-competition on climate change, the European Journalism Center (EJC) gave every blogger a Flip Mino HD Camera to support the blogging. It's as big as a normal cell phone and produces videos of outstanding quality. The camera is especially good for interviews and picks up sound very well in a range of one meter, even if the environment is noisy. I recently used it on a trip to Trento (sorry Joe); have a look here to see the quality. Current market price for an HD cam (you want HD, not the regular one) is about 190 EUR in Europe, $160 in the US.

This camera offers new opportunities for euroblogging as well. Raymond Frenken of EUX TV has been using it for short reports in the car or from a train station. Furthermore, we've been at the election night in the European Parliament with a small webTV-team from Maastricht (even though we used a bigger camera then) and found a lot of interesting people to talk to. These people would normally never be heard. But through short interviews with the Flip Cam, the world of the grey suits in the EP or the Commission can be illuminated.

Some NGOs like the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) already use videos to enhance their communication. Some MEPs also use videos. The same is possible for a witty blogger attending a panel discussion in Brussels.

And if the quality of the video is decent and the message is interesting, the MSM might even take interest in your footage!


Update: My excuses for providing a wrong link to the "tricky situations"-video. The correct link has now been put in.