Euroblogs: Online and social media in Spanish

The previous post presented three individual Spanish Euroblogs. We continue with a summary on communication by the EU and by mentioning two different collectives which publish in Spanish.



On blog Bitácora, which is a part of the Spanish version of multilingual Presseurop network, Susana del Río Villar an expert on Team Europa of the EU Commission representation in Spain describes communication challenges from the viewpoint of the EU institutions. In her first post on the subject, she discusses ‘total communication’ in Europe, which is much more than information: Comunicación integral (I) (9 September 2010).

Conceptually the European Parliament made a great leap forward ahead of the 2009 elections, although the debates were hijacked by national politics. Right now the European Commission attempts to project a more centralised and personalised message through its president José Manuel Barroso.

The virtual game Citzalia tries a different tack to engage younger citizens, but it remains to be seen if it succeeds.



What citizens do not seem to realise is that they are present daily in the real world European Parliament, through the directly elected Members of the European Parliament. Tweet your MEP (which starts on 22 September 2010) will certainly connect Europarliamentarians with citizens.

Each Euroblog has its own personality, but they publish, motivate debate and shape European public opinion on a daily basis. The former hierarchies of communication are a thing of the past. They cannot control the responses, but the messages can engage more people. Participation complements representation.



El País and La Comunidad



El País online presents itself as a global newspaper in Spanish. (Remember more than 400 million native Spanish speakers worldwide, second most globally.) It has quality reporting and opinion pieces on its pages for Europe.



La Comunidad of El País houses Euroblog, a collective European blog, where different citizen bloggers (cross)post their entries.



Europa451



Europa451 is a slightly different collective, because it is thebrainchild of five young professional journalists: Fernando Navarro, Jean Sébastien Lefebvre, Julie Gonce, Francesca Barca and Cédric Audinot.



They work together to produce articles in Spanish (Europa451.es), French (Europa451.fr) and Italian (Europa451.it).



By the way, this reminds me of the Day of Multilingual Blogging, 26 September 2010. There are many different ways to participate, but already 131 are attending and 119 may be attending.

Is crossing linguistic and national borders more useful than fun, or vice versa?




Ralf Grahn