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Brussels’ first international press club opens

Clubbing together

A dream has come true. International and Belgian journalists will be able to enjoy their own press club in Brussels from 2 February, 2011.

In a city that boasts one of the largest press corps in the world, the lack of a meeting place for all these journalists has always been an anomaly. Yes, journalists could just meet in a suitable pub or other such watering hole to exchange comments and ideas, but an official club was long awaited as a meeting place where cultural events could also be organised. Where impromptu and informal press meetings could be held without any need to report or follow up. Where the only obligation was to meet, exchange ideas, discuss topics of common interest, encounter new people and launch initiatives that might be appealing to many.

Was this asking too much? For a profession based on continuous interaction, the idea of creating a dedicated venue to do exactly this should have materialised earlier.

But up until now the idea met with resistance due perhaps to the fact that this is a city of many nationalities where many have a tendency to stick together rather than interacting with people with different cultures and languages.

Will the new press club, based just a few minutes from Rond Point Schumann, achieve miracles? At least for foreign media workers, it will provide a place to get to know journalists from other countries, particularly Belgium, since these colleagues often follow completely different routines from the international press. The two ‘species’ rarely meet and lead completely separate lives absorbed in completely different issues. If the club helps only to open doors, it will be already a great success.

 

Response to a press crisis

As a journalist who had been a correspondent in London for the Italian media for many years, I am able to understand the usefulness of this very British kind of institution: the Club, with rules that everybody is prepared to accept in the name of exclusivity and of tradition. Plus, the spreading of the English language has somewhat eroded the linguistic walls between nationalities and communities, and made it possible for many members of the press - international or Belgian alike - to start communicating in this lingua franca.

The ‘Brussels Europe Press Club’ – the somewhat grandiose official name of the newly created club -  can function as a sort of no-man’s land; an informal place where media people can meet in a convivial way, independent of nationality or language. In meetings the language(s) used will depend on what the participants decide each time and the audience they want to have.

The club was the brainchild of a critical moment for the international media. In the spring of 2010 the International Press Association (API-IPA), which gathers foreign media working in Brussels and was created over 30 years ago, sounded the alarm bell by announcing that the numbers of journalists established in Brussels had shrunk considerably from a peak of over 1,300 soon after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. 

That era was the zenith for the foreign press corps in Brussels: even the press corps in Washington was smaller. But the economic crisis, coupled with the global crisis of the media in general and the rapid growth of web-based journalism had given a coup-de-grace to many of the foreign media based in Brussels on a regular basis. A decline of several hundred rang an alarm bell ring in the ears of the Regional Authority of Brussels – the Brussels Capital Region – and they decided to do something about it. Unable to change the unfathomable rituals of the European institutions, the Brussels Region has decided, after learning of the shrinking press corps, that a press club might do the trick of making media people more interested in working and living in Brussels.

At this point I was contacted by the person the Brussels Capital Region had charged with the challenge of studying the feasibility of a press club in Brussels. Why me? Maybe because since I had arrived in Brussels as a correspondent for the Italian News Agency ANSA in the early 1990s coming from London, I have been dreaming, often even aloud, of creating a press club in Brussels, where colleagues could meet and have informal meetings and exchanges. As happens within the media grapevine, the idea circulated and meetings began with the regional authorities and the Brussels Tourist office. Then I involved the International Press Association (API) in the creation of the press club, and started contacts with the Belgian Associations of Journalists and with other media organisations present in Brussels. 

 

Location, location, location

Residence Palace was always considered by the media in Brussels as the ideal place for a Press Club, especially after the creation in 2001, by the Belgian Federal Government, of Journalists at Your Service (J@YS), a press help desk for journalists to which several media organisations active in Brussels were associated. J@YS was not a press club, though. It had other tasks, organising conferences dealing with media issues and helping newly arrived journalists in Brussels to orientate themselves in the capital of Europe and overcome some of the initial difficulties that living in a new city can bring.

The extensive construction work which has affected the Residence Palace for some years now led to shelving any immediate plans of creating a press club there however. And so when the offer from the Brussels Capital Region arrived, on the eve of the six months Belgian presidency of the European Union, it seemed that it could not be refused. A search for suitable premises started, which has ended with the signing of a three-year lease for a 400 square metre space in 95 Rue Froissart, with a courtyard in the middle, two meeting rooms and a lounge area with a bar corner.

The Brussels Europe Press Club will be officially inaugurated on 2 February, 2011 and will hopefully rapidly become a centre where international and Belgian journalists will meet and where media guests from all over the world will also be welcomed. A string of cultural events has already been planned and many more will follow.

Foreign journalists who are members of API will become members of the club, at least for the first year of its life; the Belgians will have to decide the conditions of their membership, and a series of agreements will be made with press clubs all over the world to establish reciprocal memberships schemes.

A special website will be created soon, together with a new logo and hopefully a newsletter which will inform members of initiatives and projects. But it will be up to the members – and to the board which is being created after the nomination of a president from the API-IPA Council - to come up with ideas and stimulate the interest in sharing experiences and knowledge.

In a world which is not flat but whose communication distance has dramatically telescoped the expanding of contacts will become an invaluable tool for progress. And media should reap the benefits.



Maria Laura Franciosi
Founding President of the Brussels Europe Press Club

 

Tags: brussels, club, corps, eu, europe, european, media, news, press, schumann,

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