A European voice” “

EuroNews, the “voice of the Europeans”, is a television news channel that transmits every half hour a news bulletin on world events as seen from the Old Continent. It also covers lifestyles, society, sport, culture, health, and life of the EU institutions. The whole bulletin is simultaneously broadcast in seven languages; French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. PUBLIC TELEVISIONS, AT THE SERVICE OF CITIZENS. EuroNews is based in Lyon (France). The channel has a staff of 250, comprising technicians, administrators and, especially, journalists (120) who come from all over Europe. It is directed by the Spaniard LUIS RIVAS, a veteran of pan-European broadcasting. Interviewed by Sir, Rivas explains that EuroNews “was founded in January 1993 by a consortium of public radio and television broadcasters belonging to the European Broadcasting Union, together with the journalists of some public television channels: Italian, Swiss and Spanish. The aim was to compete with CNN by broadcasting news on Europe. After the early years, with mixed public and private management (Alcatel and British ATN), the situation has now returned to its origins, i.e. with ownership firmly in the hands of European public television corporations”. There are twenty national TV channels that help to support the channel: the major shareholders are French TV, Italy’s RAI and Spanish state television”. The members also include Belgian, Finnish, Czech, Romanian, Irish and Tunisian broadcasters. It is a TV channel – continues Rivas – that was “born before the European Union. Here journalistic information has succeeded in uniting forces before politics. We have professionals of seven nationalities. And it was interesting to see how these different mentalities, cultures and schools of journalism succeeded in finding points in common and transmitting the same message in their respective languages and cultures”. FACTS AND NEWS IN AN INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT. EuroNews has “a different dimension than that of those who broadcast local and national news. Above all it has developed another philosophy of work that has also determined its particular organizational structure, in which journalists work in complete freedom and autonomy, without any political, economic or territorial pressure”. This team work has contributed to the creation “of a new mentality”, perhaps the root of a new method of making news. Each half hour EuroNews transmits a continuously updated bulletin with services in depth on the main news stories of the day: covering the fields of the economy, international finance, sport, weather forecasts… So every 24 hours 48 bulletins are broadcast. The programmes are often interrupted to transmit breaking news stories in real time. EuroNews also carries reports on issues of particular interest to European citizens. Regular features dedicated to continental news include Pass, Europe, Europeans and Parliament. A recurrent feature are also the “exclusive interviews” with leading personalities: Pat Cox, Romano Prodi, the current President of the European Council; not only politicians, but also researchers, personalities from the world of culture and entertainment… The originality that has permitted the media success of EuroNews is to “make the news speak” through the image. The news bulletins, brief and concise, privilege images on the stories of the day rather than the presence of presenters or anchormen, who have been eliminated; the images are accompanied by voiceovers. “A RADIO WITH IMAGES”. There’s a regular feature that has become a kind of signature tune of EuroNews: “No comment”. It’s a brief series of news flashes in images alone, without comment: a real “revolution” of which the Lyon headquarters of EuroNews is particularly proud. In the view of CLAUDIO ROSMINO, one of the seven editors of EuroNews, “No comment” is “our brand name. Born in 1993 together with the television channel itself, it has become a slot in which we transmit images already used or not by TV news bulletins, without comment. All that appears on the screen, apart from the images, are the date and name of the place of the event being transmitted. This is also the best-known editorial product with which we have succeeded in capturing the attention of the public and simultaneously making news. In this case it’s the viewer himself who forms his own opinion on the events. Also for this we have been compared to a radio with images. For us it isn’t an offensive comparison, on the contrary…”. The figures on the channel’s audience are growing. EuroNews reaches the homes of 145 million families in Europe and all over the world. It’s a result that makes it the leading channel of pan-European information.