Not sexy, but necessary. The dire fate of EU topics

Young journalists as well as European Commission officials present at the EYJA-conference admit that writing about EU topics is challenging, but feasible with the proper skills and imagination. The participating countries of this year’s European Young Journalist Award can be divided into two groups: those that received a lot of articles and those where the participation rate was not that overwhelming.

Some pattern can be distingu­ished. It was to be expected that countries that recently joined the EU, such as Bulgaria and Romania, and some of the candidate countries would end up with most contributions, as the accession or possible accession to the EU has recently been a very important part of their life.

The Turkish winner, 29 year-old Kaan Kosemehmet, assured that not a day passes without the media in his country discussing EU-related topics. “It is definitely part of our everyday life.” Journalists are free to express their views about good and bad things that can happen when joining the EU. “We are not only writing about politics, we try to show to the Turks how accession to the EU would influence their lives.” Turkey is one of the positive examples of the award, but there are countries that did not do so well.

Possible Estonian participants pointed out before the deadline that the topic of this competition – EU enlargement – is not attractive enough to write about. Editors often refuse to publish texts about the topic, because of the lack of readers. As a result, only two Estonian articles were submitted and the jury decided not to assign a winner. Former journalist Karel Bartak, now Head of Youth Policy of DG EAC of the European Commission agrees: “Writing about the EU usually is boring and technical, but it has to be done.” He reproaches the jour­nalists for concentrating too much on politician’s views and forgetting those who will be influenced by the changes: regular citizens, children, youth and pensioners. “Often the editors do not give enough resources to deal with EU topics, because it doesn’t sell any papers. It would be perfect if at least two people could work on a story, one reporting about the Brussels aspect and the other dealing with local issues. It takes skills and time, but it can be done,” he states.

Whose job is it to convince the editors about the importance of EU issues? “I think the European Com­mission should invite them more often to seminars and conferences, but they are just not coming, they send someone else.”

By: Anniki Leppik