This is definitely not what we expected, given that we had reached an agreement with the Parliament in past years. We spent a long time coming up with alternative proposals, in order to somehow make the EYMD happen, but nothing worked out for 2009.

This is a great pity, because the last two European Youth Media Days have really shown the potential of a great network of young journalists all over Europe. We are currently working on possibilities for organizing future editions of the EYMD – we’ll keep you posted.

There’s bound to be plenty more language comparisons – especially once we get our organizing team together and welcome another 40 or so European journalists into our community!

So what are we doing here? Well, the EYMD are officially hosted by the European Parliament, and we (as part of the European Youth Press) are responsible for the organisational side. For this to work, we need close cooperation with MEPs and with Parliament staff, who we’ll be needing both to participate in workshops and discussions, but also to help communicate our event all throughout the EU. It’s important too that we’re really up to date with what’s going on in the Parliament between now and October – that we know what MEPs are working on, when we’ll be able to get hold of them – and that we establish as soon as possible who we want to work with. It’s also been a great chance to see the way things work from inside the press room and to begin working together in these busy, multilingual surroundings. And while we’re here, we’ve also managed to meet with the Council of Europe to discuss possible cooperation with them.

The new parliament has the potential to make for an interesting next term, with new political groups formed and an increased number of eurosceptic and nationalist members. 35% of MEPs are women, and members include 3 former Commissioners and 8 former prime ministers. This morning’s lively session reviewing the Czech presidency of the EU saw Nigel Farage of the highly eurosceptic UK Independence Party taking on Mr Barroso, seated just 2 seats away: “You don’t ever support the results of democratic processes, it’s all about power, it’s all about you and the institutions… I hope the Irish tell you all where to go!” Barroso’s only response was to point out that if Farage was allowed to display the British flag at his seat, then he’d do the same – and he happily displayed his own – conveniently available – EU flag. This afternoon, a joint press conference with EP president, Commission president and Swedish PM revealed more confusion than anything else about how things are going to proceed in the next six months until the treaty deadlock is cleared up. Interesting times…

Denisa, Jona, Anna

Our coordination team is finally all in the same country and we’re really excited to be getting stuck in. We’ve already spent a few weeks working from home, discussing ideas via Skype conference calls – across 3 time zones. As useful as online communication is, meeting up face-to-face on Monday has made things much easier. We’re currently in Strasbourg where we’re spending a few days in the European Parliament, but on Friday we’ll be back in Brussels and the EYMD office will buzzing once more.

Now that our team is fully operational here’s a quick introduction to the people you’ll be hearing a lot more from over the next few months. Jona from Germany and Anna from Northern Ireland (till mid-August) are Project Coordinators, responsible for overall coordination of the Media Days, from obtaining funding to relations with MEPs to publicising the event, and more. Denisa from Romania is Programme Coordinator, and also works on overall coordination, but is more specifically responsible for designing and supervising the programme. Between us we have loads of experience in journalism, new media, international event organisation, EU institutions and communications. Both Jona and Denisa were involved in last year’s EYMD organisation.

We can’t wait to see what ideas and initiatives emerge over the next few months – we’ll keep you posted!

EYMD Team call

Creative? Energetic? Media-mad?
Ready to dive in? Join our Team on http://join.youthmediadays.eu !

From 14-16 October 2009, the European Parliament with the support of the European Youth Press will host the 3rd European Youth Media Days in Brussels.

More than 200 young journalists from across the European continent will gather at the European Parliament to produce print, online and audiovisual media, and to discuss European politics and journalism. This will be a unique opportunity for participants to interact and share experiences with young journalists of different backgrounds, to participate in workshops and panel discussions with experts – and to get an insider’s view of Brussels.

You can actively shape this event by joining our organisational team! We need up to 40 experienced young journalists, communications whizzes and organisational superbrains to facilitate workshops, communicate and promote the event, design the programme and organise and manage various parts of the event. Experience is a bonus, but above all, we want motivation and creativity!

This work experience offers an insight into the worlds of media and politics at a European level as well as a network of valuable contacts plus excellent experience for a future career in journalism or project management.

Apply for the team on: http://join.youthmediadays.eu/
Have a look at our Team Call on http://join.youthmediadays.eu/Apply_for_EYMD-Team.pdf

We are looking forward to seeing your ideas and building up a top-notch team for the European Youth Media Days 2009!

Twitter: http://twitter.com/EYMD
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/European-Youth-Media-Days/88701517827?ref=

We are also proud to announce that we finally found a title!!! But we will keep it as a secret and will discover it at the final presentation in the evening.  Now we are all working on a presentation of our team/work for the final event. It  will look like our tabloid: colorful! We can’t tell you more, maybe just a hint … it includes at least one of the official colors of this year’s European Youth Media Days.

Sophie and Mitja

Some of us didn’t know excatly what they were promised to, when the first day of the EYMD workshops begun.  Like me. I simply thought  “Teasing Europe” sounds interesting and political caricatures even more so. However, I didn’t know that it’s going to be about cartoons. I have very few cartoons in my bookshell, except the political satire Persepolis (which is, in my opinion, a great book). In the end of the day, I found myself talking about political caricatures and the decision-making process in the European Parliament throught the lens of cartoons rather enthusiastically.

It turned out in the first meeting of our group that we are the smallest workshop in the Media Days – only seven young media workers altogether. Almost no-one knew how to draw but everyone liked cartoons and are amused by them occacionally, though. We all agreed that there are so many things one can say by just a single drawing, whereas dozens of words would be needed otherwise. “One picture is able to tell more than a thousand words”, as the expression goes. By participating to the workshop, this wisdom showed its meaningfulness in reality.

Member of the European Parliament, Elly de Groen-Kouwenhoven has worked as a journalist, essayist and commentator. She is also a member of the Group of the Greens here at the European Parliament. She has published i.e.  political cartoons, such as “a Dictator’s Manual” she gave us in three different languages. This experienced lady has strong opinions and is not afraid to express them in front of the public. We were impressed by her general straight-forwardness and fearless way of challenging traditional ways of making politics within the EU parliament. She has fresh ideas and an enthusiastic attitude towards “making the world a bit better”. An idealist, in a word. It’s a pity that she has decided to leave the European parliament – her kind of idealism is very much needed here. International politics are often quite ceremonial and the political system changes rather slowly. Someone needs to shatter it a little bit from the inside. She told us, however, that she will continue to struggle for the things she believes in, such as the dangerous nature of nuclear-based weapons. She strongly believes that there is some much toxic substances in the Iraqi soil, for example, that it’s practically a lost case. Even though her evaluation of some corners of the world made us sad, we are glad that there are persuasive and critical MEP’s who don’t take anything as such but tries to do his/her best to find out the other angle of the conventional truth. Al Gore material? Maybe.

Political cartoons are powerful when it comes to political communication. By the help of laughter, we make sense of the world around us especially when the state of things is not pleasing us. We can make fun of delicate issues by the help of caricatures and let the universal nature of human sense of humour unite us a little bit. However, there is always the danger of misinterpretation. Some issues are especially delicate, as we very well remember what happened a few years back with some caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. What happened then, reminded us of the power of the image. Humour can be either an uniting or a separating indicative. I certainly hope we have worked for the first option here in Brussels. It has turned out during this workshop that it’s actually quite difficult to summarize the challenges in the European Union decision-making process into simple drawings. However, if we manage to raise a little smile on your faces, at least for a short while, we have succeeded in something. If we can laugh to ourselves, we can’t be far from working together to evolve and make this little continent a little bit better plca to live in. An idealist thought? Perhaps so. In the end, we are entitled to being politically incorrect.

Eeva & Cecilia, Anastasia, Clare, Elisenda, Adam, Daniel and Emmanuel

We are still working, even after deadline – can you imagine?  We are actually addicted to the Press Room!

We hope other workshops are also satisfied with their work as we are.  For us it was a day of great challenge: making photos (you will find the results soon), interviewing, writing, writing and writing.

And you, how did you enjoy this day?

agata

My name is Aidan Kelly from Ireland and I’m here to tell you all about my workshop “The Bigger, The Better?” as part of EYMD 2008.

This workshop deals with all aspects of EU enlargement and I’ve got to say we’ve had some very interesting discussions so far! Today alone, we’ve had three guest speakers, each with very different opinions. The speakers themselves and their topics were designed to spark debate and they certainly achieved that!

Earlier we spoke to Professor Gyorgy Schopflin, a Hungarian MEP, who told us about the various ideologies and cultures across Europe and how important it was that the EU remained designed for European countries.

Next up was Mr Aleksander Mitic, Brussels correspondant with the Serbian national News Agency. He imspired great debate after he mentioned that he believes Kosovo should remain part of  Serbia. Many participants disagreed with his point, so it was interesting for someone like me to see both points of view.

Lastly, we had Mr Guldener Somermut who spoke of Turkeys aspirations to join the Union. It was another fascinating debate and one which will be a topic of conversation for many years to come, no doubt.

The workshop has been getting along great – we’re all in high spirits and laughs are never far away. We ‘have the craic’ to use an Irish expression for fun!

Well that’s it for today. I must go finish my article for our tabloid newspaper- keep an eye out for it on the website!

Keep safe!

Aidan

How our day started? We met three incredible MEPs (all of them incredible women) and we talked about gender equality, women issues (are they any or not?), what could we do about the reconciliation of the family?

What we did next? Heh, getting our money EP keeps its words.

We even had our third coffee to be more productive on brainstorming! And if yesterday filling 16 pages sounds like too-hard-to-happen, today we thought we will need 160. It is definitely impressive how creative we could be, even though most of us are not professionals.

13:15. 15 minutes to our lunch break. Everybody needs rest, but I guess, we will continue collaborating on the pages even then. Why? Because we enjoy it and if it was up to us, we could probably spends weeks here… Sharing ideas, having fun. Staying creative.

P.S. 2 hours until todays deadline. Let’s write! Let’s do EUROpolitan

agata and mariya