Has ’boring Brussels’ just got exciting?

A new report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism says news desks believe their audiences have found stories about Brussels too boring and technical in the past. However, most Brussels-based reporters believe that a more divided parliament, with one third of the MPs representing Eurosceptic parties of various kinds, has created the drama to make parliament easier to cover. The findings come in  'Reporting the EU' by John Lloyd, a Senior Research Fellow at RISJ and Cristina Marconi, journalist and RISJ Fellow, in the latest of the Institute's 'Challenges' series. Interviews with news desks show that at the start of the Eurozone crisis, many of the journalists covering the EU struggled to understand the complexity of the financial and monetary crisis. The mechanisms developed to deal with it were outside of the expertise of many - though most worked hard to improve their understanding, with some taking crash courses in economics and finance. The report finds that the Brussels press corps remains large, but has declined in numbers of full-time correspondents. The decline in numbers is especially negative for those states most affected by the crisis, such as Greece.
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