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.

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to visit Lisbon for a lovely long holiday weekend.

Portugal is now home to one of the more interesting newspaper startups (yep, you saw me put those two words next to each other) I’ve read about, called i.

Peter Preston briefly profiled it in The Guardian at the start of October. The Editor’s Weblog, in Paris, profiled it last week and the NYT took note yesterday.

Here’s a video - with English subtitles - showing a “day in the life” of the staff at i:

What makes i an interesting product?

Its magazine-style layout, for one, with bold colors and lots of cutouts. It’s design is so nice, in fact, that the Society of News Design recognized it as the best designed newspaper in Spain and Portugal.

Second, its information architecture is radically different from that of a traditional serious daily. From the NYT:

“So i puts the op-ed pieces at the front of the paper. They are followed by political, business and other news stories — all jumbled together, rather than separated by subject. An article on a political scandal in Lisbon could appear alongside a piece on a Wall Street deal, for example.

The final section, called More, groups together entertainment, culture and sports news.

“We approached the design from the way the reader thinks, not the way editors think or the way newsrooms are organized,” Mr. Avillez Figueiredo said. He said research showed that readers paid little attention to distinctions between sections and simply looked for the most interesting headlines.”

I completely agree with Figueiredo’s perspective here: When I scroll through my RSS feeds, Twitter or even a destination site like NYT or WSJ, I am always looking for the most interesting headlines. Increasingly, this tendancy is starting to translate to how I read printed newspapers.

So far, circulation and subscription figures at i look good.

I know I’d love to read it.

I think most Europeans will cringe as they watch this.

Why? The citizens of Europe who I know just can’t - for whatever reason - ever seem to just surrender to the tacky but warm embrace of sweet, tinkling music playing beneath images showing patriotic moments. This is in stark contrast to their star-spangled, American friends who tend to get teary anytime they hear Ray Charles croon America the Beautiful.

One Greek tweeter I am following referred to this video as “touching but contrived.”

In my opinion this is a very well-done video montage. It might be a little tacky, but the images and theme don’t seem to me at all contrived. It shows the life of a young family living alongside defining moments in recent history about which Europeans should be proud, especially those working toward a pan-European identity.

The interactive timeline here is also nice (and less cheesy).

I think some of the reluctance on the part of EU citizens to embrace moments like this as positive developments toward a pan-European identity stems from a generational gap. But from what I can tell, the Erasmus movement and the emergence of English-language publications around Europe - many of them cooperative efforts - indicate a growing EU identity.

Some media products conveying a pan-European mentality (and of which I’m aware) include:

Th!nk About It (Europe-wide blog platform on sociopolitical issues)
Cafe Babel
PressEurop
Spiegel Online
The NRC Handelsblad (Dutch) partnership with Spiegel and PolitikenDK (Danish)

Yesterday I edited the above video together with Bernd, the video producer at the EJC. It’s a follow-up to this video:

Today my colleagues received some positive news about funding a second round of this Th!nk About It project, which features bloggers from each of the 27 Member States writing about one topic. The next topic will be climate change and lead up to the Copenhagen summit in December.

I think this is one of the most worthwhile projects my organization is doing, because it involves a hands-on new media platform on which people from so many countries are contributing and discussing ideas. Plus, the leaders of the EJC have been wise enough to spend some funds on off-line meetups, which really adds a whole new dimension to the community aspect of this blogging platform.

One thing: Bernd and I really struggled with how to end the latest video, the Portrait of a Blogger video. Any suggestions on how we could have done this better?

This video ran on Dutch TV.

I like the presenter’s chart. He does a good job showing first the results from this week’s vote in the Netherlands, then moves on to showing what the results mean in terms of seats in Parliament.

Short, sweet, informative.

Also, Reymond Frenken’s EUXTV is doing a great job covering the results. He has a playlist available below.

Margot Wallström this week stopped by the press room at the “Berlaymonster” to highlight the launch of PressEuropa.

In her opening remarks (video below), she says the site is one of many Commission attempts (there was a government tender out on this project, which means it is funded by EU taxpayers) to foster the European public information sphere.

I think the idea behind this website is a sound one. I enjoyed my first looks at the site itself, which aggregates the most interesting news sites from the top newspapers in the 27 member states. It is indeed a fun, magazine-like read. The aggregation is done by hand, as I understand it, as is the translation. Articles are translated into 10 EU languages.

The site begs two questions:

1. Are the newspapers from which stories are culled offered compensation for the repurposing of their content?

2. The stories are all selected by an independent team of journalists, but must reflect - according to the site’s editorial charter - topics of interest to the “European Project”.

I wonder if promoting wider circulation of stories involving Europe isn’t “EU propaganda”; ie, pushing the concept of “Europe” down the throats of folks residing in the member states. And if so… Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Further, is it effective propaganda (if it is)? Or is this the creation of a multilingual echo chamber?

The divergent attitudes in two articles published this week - one from Time, one from Newsweek - on the future of newspaper business models and content strategies couldn’t paint a clearer picture of the radically

different outlooks of newsgatherers in the United States and Europe.

Yesterday’s Newsweek article Dubious New Models for News concludes that American newspapers are destined to muddled business models.

It finishes on this sentence:

“Capitalists in the news business are having to become even more creative. But they won’t find the grail of a new economic model for journalism because there wasn’t an old one.”

Gee, wow. I’m fired up. Really.

Basically, no new clarity or exciting ways forward will soon emerge… Because the old ways weren’t any good. Tre optimistic!

On the other hand, Time Magazine’s article Turning the Page: The News on Europe’s Newspapers, is bursting with examples of innovative products and practices from the Netherlands, Norway and England.

It concludes with a quote from Max Armanet, the editor of the French daily,

” ‘It’s my job to make people desire us — I am the editor in charge of Love. I can’t tell you whether we’ll be here in five years, but I can tell you it’s a passionate undertaking.’ Passion probably isn’t a bad place to start.”

Much better. Maybe what the Americans call the “old college try” is becoming more of “the old… University Try”?

Yesterday I edited a synopsis of a most disturbing bill working its way through the Italian legislature.

A center-right Italian senator from Sicily is backing a bill that would give the country’s Ministry

of the Interior the power to demand ISPs in Italy block sites which host content seen to incite or condone crime.

Facebook seems to be the primary target. The American social networking platform allows registered users to form fan groups around just about any idea. Among the most offending groups to these Italian lawmakers are groups honoring big-name Mafia bosses.

Unless Facebook would agree to take those groups down - and the Ministry of the Interior would indeed have to give sites like Facebook time to take down the offending content - the entire site would be blocked inside Italy.

Deleting entire websites because of a bit of offensive material seems an entirely arcane practice for 2009.

But the situation does for me beg the question: In today’s linked-up world, should multinational sites like Facebook (and, to be clear, while all websites have the potential to be multinational, few truly are) have to abide by the laws of countries other than the nation in which their servers sit? Which is to say,should a website based in the United States, like Facebook, have to regulate its content with Italian law in mind?

I’m reminded of a November, 2008, New York Times article about censorship at Google.

In the Republic of Turkey, a nation of 71 million people, it is illegal to insult Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He is the founder of modern Turkey.

Google, apparently, has dedicated the hours of many staffers to screening the contents of YouTube videos that are reported to violate Turkish law. The videos which Google decides are in clear violation of Turkish law are then blocked in Turkey.

The article chronicles similar cases in Europe. In France and Germany, for example, Google blocks Holocaust denial sites because it is illegal to deny the Shoah in those countries.

But is a California-based company like Google - or a Ministry of the Interior in Italy - the best body to decide what to censor?

Germany has a government agency whose responsibility it is to gather URLs of sites that host illegal content (content including hate speech, for example, would be illegal in Deutschland). Is this a better way to go? Why not get a judicial system involved? Or would that take too long, particularly when considering the warp speed that dominates the World Wide Web?

These questions become even more difficult - or perhaps just less relevant? - when considering the many initiatives to circumvent censorship. One of the best initiatives is the Tor project, which helps Internet users surf the web anonymously.