Blogs: Filling the EU's 'communication gap'?[fr][de] 

A weblog or blog is an internet site in which individual citizens express their ideas and talk about their experiences in the form of a personal online diary. Blogs have become very popular in the past few years. In May 2007, there were more than 71 million blogs on the internet, a web-based community frequently referred to as the "blogosphere". (For an introduction to blogs, see Wikipedia .)

Some blogs offer comment or news on global, international, national or local political developments, and are increasingly perceived as a new form of "grass-roots" or "citizens' journalism". 

Sometimes, blogs on a particular subject are aggregated together on a blog aggregator. A blog platform is the content-management system used by bloggers to create their messages (such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com).

Blogs are just one form of the new "social media" that are being used by internet citizens to share opinions and experiences. Other social media tools include podcasts, wikis, videos (see YouTube ).

The emergence of blogs and citizens' journalism poses several challenges to traditional media: 

• The quality of internet blogs is very uneven. In addition, some blogs publish on a regular (daily) basis, others have only a few posts per month.
• Most professional journalists consider the new generation of bloggers as lacking professional standards and ethics.
• On the other hand, bloggers have questionned the independence of media that sometimes shy away from taking a critical stance on institutions or corporations from which they may receive funding or advertising. Some 'blog watchers' have asked whether it is ethical when a journalist writes a "mainstream" story for his media and then publishes a blog post that adopts a more critical and subjective tone.
• Journalist associations (IFJ , IPA/API ) have had problems adapting to internet-based journalism. In Brussels, for some years, online journalists were denied official accreditation to the EU institutions. What about the new bloggers? How should they fit in the Brussels press corps? What rules should they be subject to? At an EU stakeholder workshop in Helsinki in December 2006, traditional media experts and professionals had a difficult time defining the role of blogs and other new trends in relation to the established EU journalism (EurActiv 7/12/06).

Some EU lawmakers have seen blogs as a way to reconnect with citizens, following the rejection of the draft EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands. Following the early example of Commission Vice-President Margot Wallström , three other commissioners (Boel , Potocnik , Špidla ) now also run regular blogs and two others (Dimas and Kuneva) are preparing theirs. 

Individual citizens have also started EU-related blogs and even professional journalists and media have created their own blogs to comment on EU affairs (see FT Brussels blog , the BBC's Mark Mardell's Euroblog  and Jean Quatremer's Coulisses de Bruxelles  blog for Libération).

In November 2006, the Commission's Communication DG organised a special workshop on "empowering citizens" in the context of its White Paper on an EU Communications policy. The conference, held in the Italian town of Bergamo, also included contributions by citizen bloggers on how they use this new medium to inform and comment on the European Union (presentations available here ).

But there are also questions as to how far blogging might help the EU's Communication policy:

• In particular, it is questionable whether blogs will reach the citizens who are not already knowledgeable about the EU. The specialised nature of blogs makes them fit to raise interest from an elite that already has an interest in EU affairs.
• It is also hard to measure the audience  of EU-related blogs. Commissioners' blogs receive up to 150,000 page-views per month. This is still relatively small compared with websites of "traditional" newspapers, which can attract more than 10 million page views per month (EurActiv's CrossLingual Network - 8 portals - attracts more than 2 million).

Contrary to the US, where bloggers have become influential, European bloggers are still relatively unknown. Following a US trend, European blogs are becoming increasingly relevant for public affairs and corporate communication. However, they also pose a number of challenges to companies:

• Initially, corporations and lobby groups saw blogs as a threat -  they were afraid of rumours being spread and that little could be done against wrong or misleading postings, which could come from disgruntled employees or clients. Reputation and brand assets are hugely important for corporations and take less time to damage than to create. This has happened in a number of cases, which led to a growing number of companies monitoring blogs, either themselves or via consultants.
• Some progressive companies quickly realised the potential of blogs to engage clients and other stakeholders in healthy debates and to give an impression of being open to criticism and suggestions. Some corporations pay employees or consultants to post blogs, but since fellow bloggers are often inquisitive, any attempt to misrepresent the relationship can backfire. The tone of such postings can be fact-based rebuttal, but more often it is humorous and self critical, gaining goodwill and creative ideas from readers and fellow bloggers.

In a post on her blog that attracted many reactions , Commissioner Margot Wallström wrote: "In Sweden there has been a debate about bloggers being subject to mobbing, threats and hate-mails. What is it with the internet that makes people lose all their senses?"

John Suler, American psychologist and internet expert has studied the phenomenon and calls it the "online disinhibition effect". In real life, how we talk and what we say is very much dependent on the reactions that we get from our social peers – but the internet frquently undermines such etiquette. Instead, there are often six different effects, reinforcing each other:

1. Anonymity: This gives some internet users the belief that they can post anything they wish;
2. Invisibility: The recipient's reaction is not visible.
3. Time lag: It may take a long time before you get a reaction to what you have written.
4. "The rest of the world doesn't exist": Some internet-users believe that what goes on there, exists only in their minds.
5. "It is a game": Life on the internet is not for real.
6. Lack of authority. On the internet, all users are equal.

Suler states that the sum of these effects can be very influential. Some share their private life and experiences, others use the opportunity to voice their anger and frustration, without any self-control.

Richard Edelman is the CEO of Edelman, the consultancy that startled discussions in 2006, when it conlcuded a co-operation agreement with blog search engine technorati. In a "guide to the blogosphere for marketers and & company stakeholders"  authored by both companies in late 2006, Edelman writes: "We are moving away from the traditional pyramid of influence with its top-down, one-way information flow to a more fluid, horizontal peer-to-peer paradigm, in which brands and corporate reputations are built by engaging multiple stakeholders through continuous dialogue. Under the traditional model, public relations professionals brief a select group of opinion-leading elites, and then they reach out to a broader audience through the mass media and industry press. In the new model, employees are briefed about company decisions through in-house newsletters, internal emails and town-hall-style meetings. Today, rank-and-file employees will blog about their companies while consumers will speak directly to people who share similar interests. These individuals have not been media trained. They are on the Web sharing ideas and collaborating. They are co-creating tomorrow’s products, brands and corporate reputations continuously and spontaneously. In this environment, investors and regulators are likely to read about a company’s plans before management has released them."  

Natalie Sarkic-Todd, managing director with Ogilvy PR and Public Affairs Brussels, said: "In today’s stakeholder society, it is no longer enough to engage with policymakers to influence public-policy outcomes. Politicians are increasingly influenced by the media and the public demand for democratic accountability. Citizens are empowered by the internet to make their voices heard and hold politicians to account. Blogging has become an important tool in the online communications world where opinions count and word-of-mouth travels across the globe at the speed of light. New media allows us to express our opinions and engage in conversations with a wider range of stakeholders than ever before."

James Stevens, Senior Consultant at Fleishman-Hillard EU and contributor to the company's Public Affairs 2.0 blog, said: "Politicians in Europe are beginning to grasp the opportunity that blogs offer to connect with citizens. As public affairs continues to focus on putting issues on the political agenda rather than taking them off it, the use of online tools such as blogs to shape the public policy environment is only likely to increase. Brussels' issue focus provides fertile ground for blogs as well as an increased use of online grassroots activism." 

Karlin Lillington is a technology journalist with the Irish Times, who believes that the main difference between blogging and traditional journalism is that bloggers need not care about being neutral. However, bloggers should not think that they are exempt from libel laws: "These court cases are waiting out there."

Aidan White is secretary-general of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). He runs a blog on the IFJ's web site that features issues on which an IFJ official position would be difficult to reach. For him, blogging is a positive development, because it has raised for the first time a widespread public discussion on questions of quality in journalism. There is no contradiction, White said, between blogging and journalistic standards. But bloggers should learn to adhere to the principles of quality -most importantly to state their sources. 

Thomas Burg is an academic at the University of Krems in Austria and the initiator of the BlogTalk conference. He stresses that blogging is not so much about content but more about building networks and forming groups. Blogs, he believes, are a tool that in itself is neither positive nor negative, but that certain basic principles are required. 

Richard Corbett is a British Labour MEP, the first to launch a blog . He used it first as an online dairy, illustrating an MEP's daily life, but has now switched to a more topical approach, reaching out to voters and rebutting Eurosceptics. Corbett thinks that there is indeed a lack of control for quality in the blogosphere, but that there is not much that could be done about it: "I am not optimistic there."

Blogging on Café Babel , Adriano Farano had a look at what he called the "SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)" of the European blogosphere. He found interactivity and the ease of setting up a blog and publishing on it to be the main strength, whereas ideological and linguistic exclusivity were a weakness, citing censorship of comments and the exclusion of positions which are not along the same lines as the main bloggers' as an example. Farano found, however, that blogs had an opportunity to "invigorate the European debate", even if they were threatened by "the deafness of politicians". 

Giacomo, a commenter on Jon Worth's blog , wrote: "It seems the problem is a little circular: because we lack a really European public square, so we try to use blogs for building it, but we have discovered that we lack a really European virtual public square where to aggregate our blogs." 

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