coffeefactory

What do the cafebabel.com team at HQ in Paris look like? Find out by clicking on this link to see them on the 'Soir 3' programme on France 3, on Friday 26 September.

Rome. Fiumicino airport. The exit of terminal C. Thirty glorious degrees over five days in early September. Forty young people clucking about like your typical fifteen-year old adolescents, unleashed at the doors of their first ever nightclub. Only here, we are surrounded by suitcases, backpacks and trolleys.

The European Young Journalist Award, organised by the European commission's DG enlargement unit, took Europe's 33 winners to Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia in June.

In a follow-up event for some winners and mentors in Brussels, cafebabel.com's France and UK winners will meet commissioner Olli Rehn and other EC Representatives in Brussels on 9-10 September 08 to discuss current EU Enlargement issues.

Got any questions to pose to Rehn? Send us your ideas!

The Young European Laboratory of Theatre (JTLE) is a non-profit organisation whose aim is to create a European space for theatrical creation and study. The theatre troupe is bringing together a group of young actors from different European acting schools with a performance which will be shown in all corners of Europe.

For a long time the EU has been blamed for a deficit of democracy by political science. ‘There is a lack of European public sphere,’ the reproach says.

The fact that no functional European public sphere has been generated until now is due to the absence of pan-European media. Some pan-European media projects have failed because the diversity of European languages and distribution caused high production costs. These made the products unprofitable. Internet provides a new platform for European media, because it features structural advantages compared to other mass media. The internet is a medium which is especially appropriated to account for a European public sphere.

With my study ‘European public sphere and internet – self-image and function of pan-European online newspapers exemplified on cafebabel.com’, I find out which sites are available on the web, addressing their news coverage of Europe and the EU explicitly to European public. The structure, themes, users, self-concept and function of cafebabel.com are analysed as an example of pan-European websites.

How do pan-European websites contribute to the development of a European public sphere?

Babelians: why are pan-European websites – especially cafebabel.com – important in the European public sphere you share?

by Franziska Horsch

Franziska Horsch studies journalism and communications at the University of Hamburg.