Should someone in Europe promote an European News Network?
Pablo Díaz de Rábago
May 31, 2006
This title might immediately direct your thoughts to that political and Babelic compromise called “Euronews”. If you ever heard of it. On a second thought, the ingenuity of the author shall be questioned, since we know politicians would never find an agreement even on the language to be used.
But has any of you thought that this effort should be done by private enterprise? Why has no Euro-style Ted Turner stepped up and faced the challenge?
You will claim there is no advertising market or distribution for the product. You may claim also that, ultimately, advertisers would not know how to tackle the European audience.
As some commercial channels as Eurosport have shown (following the ESPN business model), there is a market for European audience. In fact, the trend of the last years has been for brands to become global. Apparel and sports brands, food and beverage brands, retail brands, entertainment brands…
With regards to the distribution issue, since the starting satellite pan-european distribution networks much has been advanced. You can now distribute TV content via terrestrial radio (unfortunately a politically controlled oligopoly in most of Europe) via Satellite (a duopoly with very large players and a limited number of transponders to rent) but most recently via cable and telephone networks and even mobile networks. Reaching deals with content distributors may now start becoming easier than it has been in the past.
But my fear is not that there is no market or no distribution for the product, but that there would be no content. Apart from the tier of daily events, and certainly of certain Euro-style sports like soccer, or even snooker, it would be very difficult to find the European political news to report.
Only when real power develops at European level, or the European Politicians learn how to articulate it for the man on the street, there will be appetite for European Political News and for the Hearstic power of setting a media to check, balance or dance along.
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Could there be an alternative to Euronews?
A very interesting post from BlogEuropa.eu about the possibility of a new private initiative to compete with Euronews…
I am no big fan of the latter, especially in light of their biased coverage of Belarus. Yet I would love to see more…
Trackback by Sharp&Sound — June 1, 2006 @ 8:48 pm
Maybe TV would be difficult, but I think today Internet is a good media for trans-European debate and information. It is cheap, increasingly popular (+ 150% of users in last 5 years in the EU with 1 on 2 Europeans connected), multilingual…
A good example of these possibilities is http://www.cafebabel.com a European magazine in 7 languages I founded with other friends 5 years ago. Today the magazine is read by over 200,000 visitors per month (1,000,000 page views) and covers society and politics issues with a transnational perspective, thanks to a network of 20 teams.
Of course, a big road is still to do. But I am very confident in our capabilities.
Blogs like your can also contribute to the European public opinion… that’s why we’ll publish in a couple of weeks a special issue on the subject.
Hasta la proxima a los amigos de blogeuropa
Comment by Adriano Farano — June 2, 2006 @ 2:46 pm
I’ve been struggling with myself since this post was published, on how to present my thoughts… I don’t want to sound too harsh, but I think there is a reason why the US plays the leading role it plays in the current world… and why everybody else, for the most part, just follows.
CNN, the first news network on a global scale could only happen in the US… The US has a sizable own market, businessmen are used to ‘thinking big’… ‘thinking out or inside the box’… ‘thinking the box inside-out’…
In Europe, on the contrary… well, just look around…
Of course there are a number of exceptions, take EADS (Airbus manufacturers), for example.
So, there is some evidence that allows a certain room for hope, but when you consider the EU constitution fiasco… well, you once again realize about why they call them ‘exceptions’.
Comment by tfserna — June 16, 2006 @ 9:11 am
Tfserna, thanks for your comment. My post tries to ironize not only over EU Political content, but also on the way politicians try to approach information markets.
On the other hand, News as a business is utterly complex since for the model to work, apart from content and distribution, you need credibility to generate audience, a very difficult value to achieve from scratch.
Comment by Pablo Díaz de Rábago — June 16, 2006 @ 9:50 am
Pablo: Many thanks for your very kind response.
I think you just hit one ‘sweetspot’ there…
(…)”the way politicians try to approach information markets.”
Politicians shouldn’t ‘approach’ information markets. Mixing politics and business/markets is a relevant one of the different poisons that plague each and everyone of the EU marketplaces…
Of course this happens -at some level-, everywhere. But the extremely high level of political intervention we suffer here –sometimes even the well intented one–, greatly biases and distorts the markets.
As for ‘audience generation’… I don’t know and can’t tell what Mr. Turner was thinking when he started to build CNN from the ground up… but he actually developed a market for his project… Credibility was/is just a consequence of continued hard work.
All the best, TFS
Comment by tfserna — June 16, 2006 @ 10:25 am
TFS, I agree that credibility was/is just a consequence of continued hard work; I would only add “and ethical commitment”
If I find the way to organize that ethical commitment, we may just be at the beggining of a “ENN”
I will work on defining the basis for the commitment, using materials from the declaration of human rights, and from the international press principles.
I will also try and find how to incorporate “independence” to that charter. From my point of view, that is the crux in the equation.
If anyone out there can feed me with the right materials, I will be delighted to consider them.
Comment by Pablo Díaz de Rábago — June 16, 2006 @ 10:40 am