Kathlyn Clore

They may appear just another group of anonymous geeks banging away behind laptops in your local café. But online — and in Brussels — the bloggers who write about the European Union are starting to be noticed.

“There is some kind of European blogosphere evolving, at least for some issues,” prominent EU blogger Julien Frisch wrote in one of his first posts of 2010.

“And that if (influential) national blogs take up European questions, they can become more important than one might initially expect.”

The remark came at the end of a post describing information flow within the community of bloggers concerned with the daily politics of the European Union.

One of the best places to delve into this community is Bloggingportal.eu, which promotes the most interesting posts of the day from among more than 500 EU blogs. Frisch’s site is among them.

The team of 25 volunteer editors at Bloggingportal.eu reads hundreds of posts every day. They link to the most interesting of the bunch on their front page.

“We want to reach people that do not necessarily read blogs and we want to show that there is a quality debate going on when it comes to the EU and European debates,” said Andreas Müllerleile, one of the site’s founders. He also blogs on EU issues at Kosmopolitio.

“The long-term goal is to offer a selection of the best blog posts in as many EU languages as possible.”

Bloggingportal.eu turned a year old in January, 2010. The number of blogs it aggregates and monitors has doubled since its launch.

“It somehow shows that we are growing although some blogs stopped posting regularly and it is difficult to filter them out,” Müllerleile said. “However, compared with national political blogopsheres the number is still tiny and I think we still have not reached a critical number of people who write regularly on EU/European affairs.”

Bloggingportal.eu launched on 25 January, 2009, the result of follow-up efforts to a pair of 2007 blog posts about the development of an EU blogosphere. In these, EU blogger Jon Worth attempted to categorise and characterise prominent EU blogs.

“The sheer number of links below means I never quite know where to start for good EU analysis on blogs – maybe time for some better aggregation somewhere?,” he wrote.

So began Bloggingportal.eu. It started as a collaboration between Worth, Müllerleile, and Norwegian media professional Bente Kalsnes. Stefan Happer donated programming expertise and the site initially aggregated about 275 blogs.

“We do not have any funding so we have been working on it in our free time which has been a challenge. We are still beta and we are trying to implement new features. And we are always looking for new people who want to get involved,” Müllerleile said.

The community of people who are interested in closely following the political machinery of the EU may be small, with many a student among the bunch.

But most EU bloggers are focused on moving beyond surface-level EU stories that appear in traditional national newspapers. Many of these stories contain inaccurate information, Müllerleile said. The EU blogosophere is a realm in which to suss and discuss errors made in mainstream press.

To those Europeans surfing happily outside the existing EU blogosphere, though, examining and debating the inner workings of the European Union is a fantastically dry proposition.

Curation – employing editors handpick the most noteworthy posts – is an attempt to make the EU blogosphere more accessible, personal and relevant.

“So many Europeans feel disconnected from European issues and bogged down by the complexity of the institution itself. Having an editor create a path through the information can be a definite bonus for those not already familiar with the topic,” said Ruth Spencer, an editor at Th!nk About It, a European blogging platform supported by the EJC.

This idea is captured in the logo of Bloggingportal; here the stars of the European Union flag dance within what could appear to be a drop of water.

The drop represents the “pure essence” squeezed out of the EU blogosphere, Müllerleile said.

Will it catch on?

This may depend on the ability of writers, translators (machine or human) and readers to break through language barriers.

At the moment, national communities in Europe do not interact much with one another online, a report by French research agency Linkfluence concluded in autumn, 2009. Most interactions and conversations happen within the respective national communities, the report said.

Conversations about how to best overcome this challenge are happening around the EU blogosphere. Models like Café Babel, which pays translators, and Global Voices, which uses volunteer translators, are often cited.

“Bloggingportal isn’t a content creator but an aggregator,” said Spencer, the Th!nk About It editor. “The best they can do is take as much as possible from all the EU languages.”

Müllerleile said Bloggingportal.eu initially tried translating posts using automatic machine translation, but were unsatisfied with the results.

“We are thinking of other solutions but nothing has emerged just yet,” he said.

It’s indeed a good challenge for Bloggingportal’s future years.

I heard Mehmet Koksal speak at the European Investigative Journalism Conference. He gave a great insight into what it takes to cover minority issues in Europe. I think these communities are truly harder to penetrate in Europe than in the United States, where it seems everyone wants to assimilate and “be American.” From what I’ve experienced living in the Netherlands, you don’t really hear recent immigrants (legal or otherwise) talking about wanting to “be European,” or even “be Dutch.”

Heck, you barely hear Europeans speak about wanting to “be European!” Anyway, the following is the article I wrote after speaking further with Mehmet about the issues he raised at the conference. I had a delay in between interviewing him and publishing this, but I found his anecdotes and advice truly interesting and worthwhile for journalists to know.

Especially at its so-called heart, Europe is home to a dizzying array of small communities. Each capitol city has its own Turkish neighbourhoods, Jewish neighbourhoods and students’ areas.

All with their own stories.

But these communities can be wary of outsiders. Language barriers abound. Especially in cities outside their normal beats, journalists often need help going local. That’s where fixers come in.

Mehmet Koksal, 31, has been working as a fixer in Brussels since around 2000, when he started sharing his investigative work on a blog. He grew up in French-speaking Brussels, but both of his parents come from Turkey. He also speaks Dutch and English. After a year studying in St. Petersburg, he speaks Russian.

When he was a recent university graduate working outside the mainstream Belgian press, Koksal used a blog to promote transparency between minority groups in Belgium. He’d translate what was being said by actors in the political sphere, often revealing the efforts of politicians trying to influence voters by way of a different language.

“Most of the time that created a huge controversy,” he says.

He remains well-sourced in Belgium, particularly in minority communities. In addition to working as a fixer for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal Europe, he is a self-employed freelance journalist working for several news agencies as well as Courier International and IPS. He also works as an official translator for police and judges in Belgium.

Tips from Koksal and other journalists who have worked with fixers:

1. A good fixer isn’t too hard to find… If you know where to look

Koksal says journalists researching stories about minority issues in Belgium often stumble upon his name. They see he is working for established newspapers.

“The journalists’ world is a small world. If you know someone is a good person to work with, you give the name to your colleague who is coming to Brussels… I’m doing it when I go abroad, call some local contacts to see if they can give me the name of who I should contact.”

2. The motivations of a good fixer should be transparent. Is he in it for love or for money? His reputation should also be easy to ascertain.

Koksal is passionate about investigating where the mainstream press is not allowed. Plus, working with other journalists gives him a chance to learn on the job.

“I’m also receiving ideas for further articles,” he says. “And I never learned so much as when I worked for the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal as a fixer.”

3. A good fixer speaks the language of your sources. A great fixer speaks in an authentic accent and knows local slang. That can mean anything from speaking Russian in Latvia to speaking German with a wicked Turkish accent.

“In some communities, a brown-haired fixer who knows the slang is the most useful,” Koksal says.

4. The fixer should be steeped in the cultural background of your sources. He should anticipate their concerns and be able to address those in an honest, clear fashion.

“Turkish people sometimes see journalists as people who are promoting, who are only doing good coverage to promote a film for the movie industry, or a book for a famous writer,” Koksal says. “The first thing is to explain to those minority groups the idea of journalism, checks and balances, what the idea of transparency is… Most of the time we start from zero. So if you go in with your Ph.D. from a big university and you are expecting the same degree of knowledge, it simply does not work.”

5. A good fixer knows her way around local bureaucracies. She knows how to find birth certificates, religious documents and can unearth driving records.

Koksal worked with Craig Smith from The New York Times worked with Craig Smith from The New York Times to explore the background of Muriel Degauque, the first European woman to stage a suicide attack in Iraq. He worked to find her family, her friends, where she went to school, how she met her husband, when she converted to Islam, what kind of mosque she attended.

6. Reliable fixers will work with journalists to sync expectations about costs, decorum and safety prior to working together.

“I had an experience working with a fixer in Kashmir a few years ago,” e-mails American photographer Jenna Isaacson Pfueller. “I was paired up with two young men and an older driver. On the second day one of the young men began saying things and making advances I was uncomfortable with. Luckily I was able to quickly find another, female fixer I was much, much more comfortable with.

My advice would be to get to know your fixers a little bit, or talk with people they’ve worked with in the past before heading places that are even more unfamiliar than where you are. Since you’re trusting and paying this person and will be spending a good deal of time with them, you don’t want the added discomfort of that on top of the work you’re hoping to accomplish.”

7. When fixers are acting as translators, journalists and fixers should be able to communicate well in their bridge language to make sure each question and answer of an interview is clear. Both parties must be free to repeat, rephrase and re-clarify as much as needed.

“Make sure you understand each other perfectly,” e-mails Isabelle Roughol from a newspaper in Southeast Asia. “Even if it means repeating and reformulating your question five times, or making them repeat their answers five times. This is especially true when their English (or your whatever-language-they-speak) isn’t top-notch. One mistranslation can mean huge libel. Don’t take your chances.”

<b>8. Both parties should agree to the specific uses of the material. </b>

“I was raised in Europe, educated in the US and now work in Southeast Asia,” Roughol writes. “So I’ve had a chance to see how much journalism ethics differ from one place to the next. Make sure you and your fixer or translator are on the same page and comfortable with how each operates.”

9. Journalists should have realistic expectations of their fixers, not expecting them to construct a story.

“I’m not a magic man,” Koksal says. “Don’t call me if you have no idea what you want to write… It’s annoying when a journalist comes to Belgium and he didn’t do anything to research the subject he’s writing about.”

10. Approach the fixer with a long-term relationship in mind. Journalists who come to town looking for a one-off scoop will not be as successful as those who cultivate professional relationships.

“As a journalist you have to work on the long run,” Koksal says. “I’m living longtime relationships with my sources… and I’m not giving all their information all at once.”

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Flickr images from users Ole Begemann, cicilief and bicyclemark