Tag Archives: European Union

Thoughts from the ‘blogging world’s Eurovision song contest’

Etan Smallman, a student journalist, is participating in the European Journalism Centre’s ‘Th!nk About It’ competition. Here, he shares his thoughts on this week’s launch event, held in Brussels. Etan blogs at studentjournalist.wordpress.com.

Over 80 bloggers and journalists descended on the Belgian capital last Monday for the launch of ‘Th!nk About It’, the first ever Europe-wide blogging competition.

The brainchild of the European Journalism Centre, we will all be blogging away until June, with the aim of throwing some much needed light on that most uncool of institutions, the European Union. Think of it as the blogging world’s Eurovision Song Contest.

At the two day launch in Brussels, we were treated to presentations by – among others – the BBC’s Europe editor, Mark Mardell, the Financial Times’ Brussels bureau chief, Tony Barber, and Belgian blogger extraordinaire Clo Willaerts.

Barber and Mardell confessed that their now successful blogs came into being not from an initial personal enthusiasm for blogging, but from above: “I was ordered to,” Barber admitted.

Using podcasts, vodcasts, photos and plain old fashioned text, representatives from all 27 EU member states, will be bringing their individual experiences to the new blogging fraternity.

The official site will be launched on February 1, when readers from across the globe will be able to get involved in the discussion, as well as vote for their favourite blogs. A high-tech bonanza of prizes, from Flip Cameras to iPhones, will be awarded throughout the competition.

For an event that involved bringing dozens of international competitors from all corners of the continent to one place, everything went sensationally smoothly. There was only one controversy.

“Why isn’t the wireless working in here?” a fellow blogger publicly demanded. “WE ARE BLOGGERS,” he exclaimed, as if it were the essence of his being, an article of faith.

I was worried it was all going get a bit heated when one candid British MEP said that he was proud to have a blog, but conceded (rather warily) that he has disabled the comments facility, therefore not allowing any discussion on the site: for fear of rival parties and political groups using it as a platform for their views.

“NO COMMENTS, NO BLOG!” a militant blogger boomed at him. And that was that.

Thankfully everything continued peacefully, though I sensed there were many who wanted to officially strip the gentleman of his self-appointed status as a ‘blogger.’

It was just left to Marjory van den Broeke, head of press at the Parliament, to wrap up the day by quoting one of the speakers who described us as:

“Lively, challenging, not too respectful, young, cool and attractive. Everything bloggers should be.”

And if that is not enough to convince you that the EU – for better or for worse – can be fun, then I urge you to visit my blog to see what Euro-bloggers get up to when they – just for a few minutes – prize themselves away from their beloved MacBooks.

Suffice to say: European relations at their most amusing.

Watch the competition’s trailer here:

BBC’s Nick Robinson admits he toed government line on Iraq too strongly

Yesterday saw the BBC’s economic editor Robert Peston taken to task for his influence on the UK’s economy and his cosy relationship with the government:

The Guardian’s Matthew Weaver is worried that his blog might have too much influence, and the Daily Mash joked that Peston had reached a state of transcendence.

Meanwhile the House of Lords Communications Committee asked a panel of leading political journalists if they thought Peston was setting the reporting agenda.

Another BBC editor whose influence has been much discussed is the corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, who last night admitted he had toed the government line too strongly during his reportage of the Iraq War, and admitted that he didn’t ‘do enough’ to seek out dissenting views.

Participating in a debate entitled ‘Political campaigners and reporters: partners in democracy or rats in a sack?’ at City University, Robinson said: “The biggest self criticism I have was I got too close to government in the reporting of the Iraq war.

“I didn’t do enough to go away and say ‘well hold on, what about the other side?’

“It is the one moment in my recent career where I have thought I didn’t push hard enough, I didn’t question enough and I should have been more careful,” he said.

“I don’t think the government did set out to lie about weapons of mass destruction. I do think they systematically and cumulatively misled people. What’s the distinction?

“It was clear to me that Alastair Campbell knew how what he was saying was being reported, knew that that was a long way from the truth and was content for it so to be,” Robinson said.

“They knew it was wrong, they wanted it to be wrong – they haven’t actually lied.”

Politicians ‘actively want to avoid a debate the public wants to have’, he said.

For example, he said, Labour was reluctant to debate the implications of a single European currency.

“[The government] wanted to limit the debate to being the five tests. It wanted to avoid divisions, it simply did not want to enter a political debate,” he said.

The Conservative Party are now doing the ‘exact same thing’, Robinson said.

“They don’t want a debate on whether they will tear up the Lisbon EU treaty, they don’t really want a debate about if they will put taxes up or down, or in what way.

“These are active decisions by politicians to keep you ill-informed, and it is our job as journalists to try to fight against that.”

It isn’t the job of a journalist to ‘pick a constant fight with people in power’, he said.

“I don’t see it as a badge of pride to have endless arguments with politicians, although with Peter Mandelson they usually are.”

Journalism in Africa: Kenyan news organisations cleared of fuelling post-election violence

A report from Africa’s Independent Review Commission (IREC), which was set up to investigate last year’s disputed presidential elections in Kenya, has cleared the country’s media of professional malpractice in its coverage of the election results, and blamed the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) and politicians of delaying results at grassroots level.

The commission, which has trashed claims of rigging and alteration of presidential results at the National Tally Centre – the main complaint of the opposition, also dismissed concerns over the media’s role in the post-election violence raised by international observers, including the European Union, as overly reliant on hearsay.

IREC – headed by retired South African Judge Johann Kriegler – recommended that the media should be fed results electronically to increase speed and that a secure line of transmitting results from village polling stations to the headquarters be developed with an access password for all media houses.

“The media was under pressure to relay results, politicians and the electoral commission of Kenya delayed the numbers, the media had no choice but to report what they had, you cannot blame the beast if you have not fed it,” reads the report.

However, the report did find fault with vernacular media stations for fuelling tension after the announcement of the election results and called for a review of employment policies in media houses. “Only professionals should be employed,” it said.

“How can you blame the media when politicians forced their way into the press centre and took over the role of the ECK at a time when there was[sic] information gaps?” asked the 117-page report.

Within the next 15 days another report on the media’s handling of the elections is expected to be presented to President Mwai Kibaki and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who was chief mediator in the post-election crisis.

The report is expected to name, shame and recommend crucial steps that politicians, the media and the ECK should take to avoid a repeat of such violence in future.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Waiting for the CAR to arrive

Earlier in the week we blogged that the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer (GIJC) had received a little criticism for being a bit 1.0 in its coverage.  But if its partcipants made limited use of the social web to report live from the event, the Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) contingent was out in force and here’s what they had to say.

Paul Myers, a BBC specialist in internet research, and web trainer, told Journalism.co.uk how slow CAR is in the UK.  “People pick up on the flashy stuff like Google maps, but not CAR,” Myers said.

“This is quite typical in my experience – lots of resistance when I started training journalists in using the internet at BBC in the early 90s. It has been uphill struggle to convince people to use the web,” he told us.

In an opening session, the director of computer-assisted reporting at ProPublica, Jennifer LaFleur, urged people not to be deterred by how complicated it sounds.  “Computer assisted reporting (CAR) is doing stories based on data analysis, but it’s really just working with public records,” she said.

“Don’t get intimidated by the statistics, maths or excel and access focus: these are just the tools we use to report with.”

Along with database editor Helena Bengtsson, from Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT, LaFleur highlighted several recent successful news stories that had been unearthed by using CAR.

One, an investigation into the voting patterns of Swedish EU-parliamentarians, showed that several of the most high-profile parlimentarians abstained in 50 per cent or more of cases, causing political outcry.

But, maybe journalists should leave the more high powered CAR to the IT people? No, was the blunt answer to that audience question. CAR should be par for the course, said LaFleur. “90 per cent of stories we presented here were done with Access and Excel. I am a journalist doing journalism,” she said.

“You have to interview the data as you interview a person,’ added Helena Bengtsson. “When I do a query on data… I’m asking the data as a journalist.

“There is a lot of information in the data that IT-people wouldn’t have discovered. We’re journos first, data-specialists second,” Bengtsson said.

GCIJ Lillehammer also ran classes on RSS, scraping the web, being an online ‘bloodhound’ and effective web searching.

“There are two reasons for that: we have the training expertise and see major need for training in web research and computer assisted reporting”,  Haakon Hagsbö, from SKUP (a Norwegian foundation for investigative journalism) and one of the organisers of GIJC  Lillehammer, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It has certainly been very popular at earlier conferences. People don’t know what they don’t know until they attend the training. It’s a real eyeopener, but they soon find that it’s not rocket science, as these are simple yet powerful tools. We see more and more examples of colleagues from all over the world who meet online and use the web for research.

In reponse to Isaac Mao’s comment that there had been a low take-up of live social media reporting from the conference, Haugsbö said: “We have streamed everything live online, but other than that I don’t have a good answer to this.”

Reuters: EU investigating Google-Yahoo advertising deal

European Union anti-trust watchdogs are investigating the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo, which would see the two companies share some ad revenue.

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has called on the EU to probe the tie-up, which Google and Yahoo have said would only come into force in the US and Canada.

WAN said the deal would affect Yahoo’s ability to compete with Google in the future.

RSF is calling for EU ministers to further protect journalists in exile

Today saw the start of the ‘Building a Europe of Asylum’ ministerial conference in Paris, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have used the opportunity to ask the 27 ministers responsible for asylum policy to do more to protect the dozens of journalists and free speech activists who are forced into exile each year.

“The current situation is dramatic and most journalists seeking asylum – who mainly come from Eritrea, Iran, Iraq or Sri Lanka – have difficulty finding refuge,” the letter says. “The long waits in the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the almost systematic refusal of western embassies to grant them visas force the great majority to risk their lives by resorting to illegal immigration methods.

“For this reason, there is an urgent need not only to recognise the refugee status of journalists in your country seeking asylum but also to facilitate procedures for protected entry and emergency resettlement.”

The two-day conference begins today.

MediaGuardian: Daily Mail removes web articles over anti-Polish complaints

The Daily Mail has reached an agreement with the Federation of Poles in Great Britain (FPGB) to remove articles from its website.

The FPGB accused the Mail of publishing articles that caused “negative emotions and tensions between the new EU immigrants and local communities”.

The Mail will print a letter from the FPBG today and run the letter as a blog post on its website.

European Journalism Centre aggregation project tops 500 mark

The European Journalism Centre’s aggregation of EU newspaper feeds now features over 500 titles.

eufeeds, which includes feeds from papers in 28 European nations and European Union publications, is updated every 20 minutes.

The 45 titles representing the UK are a mixed bag from The Maidenhead Advertiser and Isle of Wight County Press to The Spectator and nationals.

Any others you’d like to see added? Contact the project’s blog.

Innovations in Journalism – Imooty.eu

Image of imooty website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

Hello. I’m Kristoffer Lassen. I’m the co-founder of Imooty.

Imooty is an interactive compendium of news stories from across Europe. It provides direct access to the latest breaking media coverage from the most important newspapers and media organizations based in the European Union, Switzerland and Norway.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Imooty makes it possible for users to compare and contrast vast amounts of information.

By clicking the European map, readers may browse through a particular country’s major and minor papers and blogs in English and local languages.

One can easily search for a particular term across all European papers or simply navigate by the common news topics such as politics, science, or business.

MyImooty allows users to create their own media universe. By collecting and saving the most frequently accessed news topics, you may collect your favourite sources on a single customized page. Each time you return to your page, the news is updated and sorted by subject, search terms and titles.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

The technical and conceptual goal of Imooty is not only to provide access to the latest breaking news, but also to enable a convenient way to review news archives.

With its integrated search engine, users may find specific content located in several different databases and retrieve them through a single business transaction. We’re also in the process of adding Podcast and IPTV modules.

4) Why are you doing this?

I’m Norwegian and co-founder Blaise Bourgeois is French but we are both expats living in Germany.

We are both interested in commentary and analysis of current events; however, keeping up to date on both the media landscape here in Berlin, as well as in our respective home countries was unmanageable.

So we set out to create a platform that could solve this problem. We believe that as the European Union continues its development, more people will migrate and follow news and current events in different languages from nearby countries.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Access to the latest news is free and we simply redirect traffic to the newspapers. Reklama: Bene pigiausios auto dalys internetu svetainėje UAB ŠIAULIŲ AUTODOTA As mentioned, also archived news will be searchable on the platform and such content will be displayed in the same format as the latest news (headline with a teaser text below it). Access to this information is a premium feature.

6) How will you make it pay?

Our business model is based on a combination of sales commission and advertising revenue.

Image of imooty website also