 What are Europeans interested in? Certainly not dealing with their past or taking responsibility for their future. So that leaves us with... Chargers. I guess we all love a good standardized charger, don't we? I do not wake up every day and I think, what people would like to click in like? But I ask myself the question like, but what people are looking for? One never knows what the audience is going to find interesting. We're a cultural journal. So we're not doing politics. What our role is to go behind the political topics and talk about the cultural topics, the underlying... News readers or media consumers, audiences are looking for opportunities to engage. They don't just want to read. They don't just want to have information come to them. The paradox is that we have so many information, but we are not informed better. Welcome to Standard Time, a Eurozone production. This is a talk show with guests from all over Europe. Today we have them join forces in our special episode where we bring you the folks behind Display Europe to talk about the house, what's and who's of European interests. I'm Reiko Kingapop, editor-in-chief of Eurozone, the magazine presenting this show. Eurozone is also a co-founder of Display Europe, a new platform bringing together different European topics through community media. Whether GMT, CET or EET, since this is a digital production, you get to watch it on your own respective European Standard Time. One day on a beach, the other day skiing in the Alps. The fantasy of the European Haven guarantees you open markets, political stability and work permits. You get to live and study in 27 different countries. All you have to do is have a stable functioning democratic economy and be there at the right time in the right geopolitical space. It's kind of like the Eurovision, where some countries just make no sense but are still there anyways. And it gets even better. Once you secure a membership in the club, there are many ways to play the system and abuse your duties. Now, speaking of Eurovision, the Song Contest is turning heads amongst young Europeans. And if there's anything that brings them all together, it's that they all agreed that Monoskin, a band whose pronunciation I had to look up because I'm too old to know what that is, so they were very hot back in 2021 when I was already old for this. But they were hot so much so that they may be enlisted to encourage young voters to vote in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections this spring. Besides Monoskin, more lighthearted topics such as the environment, housing, digitalization, the labor market and rising right-wing fascism seem to occupy the anxieties of most of the upcoming European generation, but of course, to varying degrees. While the EU promises sociopolitical cohesion across the continent, the problems arising from each of its member states pose a huge threat to its structure. Islamophobia in France, the repression of LGBTQIA rights in Poland and refugees being pushed back into the sea on the Italian border are only a small sample of the topics currently defining the European sphere. And ever since the deep insanity of Brexit took root, the United Kingdom's poorly strategized separation has resulted in a rise of Euroscepticism, including amongst Europeans themselves. Integration for EU citizens entails having a broader form of communication between them. Yet, if we are not all collectively facing the same issues, could we still be interested in the same things? How do international expats affect gentrification in Athens? How do Swedish people live? And why do they sell, in their convenience stores, Austrian goulash of all things? Alongside some founding members of the Display Europe platform, we discuss European sentiment and interests and delve into the strategies of bringing them closer together through accessible platforms for a wider audience. Agnieszka Wyszniewska is the editor-in-chief of Kritika Polityczna, a Polish opinion daily. Chicago raised Sarah Elizabeth Cooper of My Country Talks, facilitates a political dialogue and engagement journalism program for Germanist site online. Last but not least, our very own senior editor at Eurozine, Simon Garnett joins us to round out the show. Hello and very welcome. We are all Display Europe founders. One thing we talk a lot about amongst ourselves and we thought to bring in front of an audience is what are the common themes that Europeans are interested in? But Sarah, you are an initiator of a very direct intervention in this space with My Country Talks. Would you tell us about them and also what you have found in the iterations so far? What are the things that interest very different people across Europe? Yeah, so My Country Talks is a political dialogue program from the German newspaper, it's site online and it started off as a small program in just Germany where we said, hey everybody, would you like to talk to somebody who thinks differently from you? Our societies are disconnected. We feel like we have less and less opportunities to break out of our filter bubbles and our echo chambers. People don't have uncles anymore or what? But they do not talk with them. Okay, Sarah, Sarah. And also just provide maybe a lower stakes environment in which you can understand where people are coming from outside of the Christmas dinner table. Slowly expanded since 2017 when we launched to a global format and a pan-European format. So we've done now our fourth edition of Europe Talks that is a pan-European program where we say, hey Europeans, do you wanna meet someone who lives in a different country from you and also thinks differently from you and talk about these issues that don't stop at the borders like climate change and well obviously migration and other things like social values, European values and where we want our future to go. And people can participate in this year's iteration through display as well. So what are the mutual interests that they actually share? I think that everything that is on the ballot right now for the parliament elections for the EU, the issues and themes that we see coming up don't have a lot of variation. How are we gonna spend our money? Who are we as a people and what does that mean for who lives in our country and how do we see ourselves? What do we do about climate change and infrastructure and adapting to the future? How do we wanna raise our kids and what values and under which system should they be educated? Those, I wouldn't call them basic things but those are kind of universal themes. It's not just about how I might feel about those issues in Germany or in France but it's about how Germans feel about what's happening in France and having that kind of discussion as well. It's actually very rare that we have native English speakers on the show. So I apologize to everyone for having two at this time at the same time. But Simon, we are, of course, colleagues, we talk about this all the time. We know what we think is important but we don't always have an easy time identifying what an existing audience is already interested in, right? If we've learned anything, it's that one never knows what the audience is going to find interesting. So one's always surprised we're a cultural journal. So we're not doing politics or we obviously do that but we're not doing current affairs-type politics. What our role is is actually to go behind the political topics and talk about the cultural topics of the underlying when it comes to learning about the cultural debates in other European countries. I think that's something that interests people and there's a debate about how does Europe, as our kind of entity, respond and react to the Ukraine war, European foreign policy, the development of European defense policy, European army, et cetera. Less obvious ones would be... We've recently done a quite extensive focus on food and water politics. It's less obvious because who needs food and water? Well, yeah. And just today, in fact, we've published a piece on the history of fertilizers and I can tell you that this is absolutely fascinating and it's something one has to know. We get to Agnieszka finally. Kritika politichna is an opinion daily. You publish, you said, approximately four opinion pieces a day. I don't know people who have that many opinions and you have always worked with a regional scope at least, right? So you have built a network of your own and you have always worked across borders. Why was that so important to Kritika politichna in a European media sphere where most of the media are stuck in national silos? In Poland, I think most of the media stuck in the capital city. Why this is important to write what is going on around because people want to know that because we do not only publish like opinion, what do we think, what this person, another person think. We very often publish some explanations and this is something people are looking for because there is lots of information. Like there's too many information and the paradox is that we have so many information but we are not informed better. We are political magazine but political means we focus on cultural issues, social issues. Culture is very popular on our website. You ask like, you know, what are people interested in in Europe? I think they are interested in understanding. I think for years we were focused on the fact checking. There is too many information and we need to fact check everything. Like who is checking fact check websites? Like no one is doing this. Like so this... This is what I've been banging on about for such a long time. Like fact checking is really important but it's not content in and of itself. Fact checking is a tool but this is a tool to show what is happening. The huge topic in Poland, especially for young people, is like where can I live? Like if I will not gonna live with my parents, like how can I afford to rent a flat? Housing is a huge topic like everywhere. But this is something we can follow how other people are doing this, like how they do this in Vienna, how they do this in this city, why this solution is like not the best solution and so on. Admittedly the whole crisis is a very international one so the causes of the housing crisis are cross-border. That's why this topic is very interesting because it's really connected with each person. Like it doesn't matter if you're interested in politics, no interest, like it doesn't matter what your opinion or your right, left, whatever. Yeah but that's only part of the story. Join the Display Article Club, a community space to exchange ideas and talk about the hard topics. Each month we host a discussion about the articles which are featured here on Standard Time, moderated by a journalist or editor. Everyone is invited to share their opinion, ask questions and offer critique. The Article Club is also an open space to discuss culture, politics and more with people all around Europe and around the world. The Display Article Club is hosted on LinkedIn Spaces and you can join us at the URL below, on the Display Portal or you'll also find the link in Display Newsletters. Yeah but now you're stealing my thunder so let's get back to the conversation. I think this is part of this digital disease, publishing in and of itself is so much more fragmented than just 25 years ago. Sometimes I feel like there's, you know, now we talk about investigative journalism, being the solution to everything, but nobody reads investigative pieces all day, every day either, right? Nobody reads Eurazine only every day. Or if you do, let us know. Simon, how do you feel about this fragmentation? What do you think that culture journals or magazines actually offer in this space? Cultural journals are tended to be generalist so that they can include the investigative type journalism, they can include literary work, literary criticism, theory, social matters, cultural matters, etc. Eurazine takes its network and brings it onto a European level and there tries to form connections. And I think that's also part of the attraction of a cultural journalist to actually have this kind of sheer eclecticism. I just want to direct to your initial question about fragmentation and I see it happening as well. Media, as we know, is in crisis, financial crisis. They're not getting funded from public institutions. They're not getting funded from ad revenue or subscriptions. And so many media are finding that long reads, for example, or investigative journalism or essays that are over 5,000 words tend to drive the most subscriptions and the most reader engagement and loyalties. It's supposed to be an ecosystem with a lot of very different players. One-on-one of business management is that multiple contestants in the same field up to a certain level, until a monopoly arises, they actually strengthen each other. Within these talks that you facilitate, is there something that comes through about what they want to read or watch or listen to? Is there a tendency for certain types of readers to engage more or less? It really depends on where we're working and which media we're partnering with. For example, in Europe talks that we're building a pan-European coalition, we try and get a very good mix of countries and also political perspectives, large and small, indie news readers or media consumers, audiences are looking for opportunities to engage. They don't just want to read. They don't just want to have information come to them. There's this idea of journalism as a service that journalism is not just publishing information but it's creating an ecosystem for one person to understand what's happening and then understand how to make better choices in their life or find spaces for community around the topics that they're consuming information around. So I think that the people who join our programs like Europe talks or the country talks, they're relieved to have one more opportunity to actually get more information on a one-to-one level through direct exchange or talk to a journalist or just have a sounding board with somebody else to say, this is what I understand. Is it right or do you understand something different? Today we come to you from Café Disco, a cool small café here in the Zonwenviertel in Vienna, Austria. This is part of Bikes and Rails. It's a housing project whose units can never be monetized. Check out our episode on housing to learn more about it. It also houses a bike repair shop. You can hear them in the background. But now, back to where we were before. It's not very professional for an editor but I will confess that my perpetual habit of consuming news has always relied on other people's recommendations. So I've never been the kind of newspaper reader who opens it and reads it, either physically existing paper or online, just go through the whole thing. Social media now is, I see as a map, you see what my friends are reading, they like it, they recommend it, so maybe it's interesting, and what the person, I think they had a different opinion if they like it, so why they like it. So on one hand, social media can really destroy media, and we can see this. But on the other hand, this is the reality. You cannot say that I don't like this reality. I think the trick is also, and the challenge for the media, is how to use these tools to have a contact with your audience and to really have the discussion and the real conversation. I do not wake up every day and I think, what people would like to click in? But I ask myself the question, what people are looking for right now, why the most popular article right now on the website is very long interview about the sex work. And I read it and I see, because this is very complex, because there are different perspectives. We can present and we can give the very complex picture. And the contact with the audience can give you the opportunity to rethink the role of the media. Another thing I'd like to just bring up again, in connection with what you just said, is that I think that small media also have a very important role actually in this community building type function. So the advantage of a small journal, of a small website, what have you, as a media organization, is that one has the ability to access the readership or the audience, however you want to put it. And in return one gains the trust of a readership. And actually if you look at how cultural journals particularly have evolved over time, they've always been like this. They've always been communities of intellectuals and a wider readership with relatively small subcultures who have grouped around these journals. And if we look at particularly the history of journals in the Eastern part of Europe, they've had much of them have come precisely from these kind of distant miliars. It's kind of an intimate publicity and in an environment where so much is measured by the sheer number of clicks that you can generate. These publicities I think are criminally underrated because you meet your audience in a point where they are much more receptive to new ideas. For instance, for the feminist movement journals have always been crucial. These are the public spheres when you can actually make your case and establish ideas before they get to a more superficial platform and before they get disseminated to more people. But I wonder how much inserting these topics works with an intervention program like yours. Can you inject the topics in there? Do people receive it or perceive it as well as once that they would pose or what is the mixture of topics that you come up with? How do you define them? Well, first of all, the conversations are completely private. So what people actually talk about when they're discussing across these political topics is it's up to them. But the questions that we land on the discussion questions are quite varied and general. We try and pick around eight questions that cover a range of usually policy topics that are causing polarization or causing division in the society that we're working in. But everybody obviously brings their own perspective to those topics, and that's why this format seems to work so well is that what we promise you is a one-on-one conversation with one other person. And that person will come with everything that they've read and everything that they know about this topic. These are not experts. These are not academics or journalists. I think that's kind of what you're alluding to with these journals, that an idea comes and kind of takes root and then gets processed into the wider society. And I think that happens to all of us at an individual level as well. And each person meets the other person in all of their perspectives to talk about these broad issues. Hey there! Let me just flag you up. Someone who has a personal favorite of mine, easily the favorite podcaster of mine in the whole wild world. She's a colleague and a partner, Claire Potter, a professor emeritus of history from the New School for Social Research in New York. She was the co-founder of Public Seminar, one of our partners in the URZ Network and her sub-stack called Political Junkie and her podcast called Why Now Are Fantastic. So if you like these kinds of in-depth and entertaining conversations, you're going to love everything that Claire does. Subscribe to her sub-stack, listen to her podcast and just tell her that you love her because she deserves all good things in the world. Now back to the program. Cultural exchange, the model idea that I got as a child seemed like a one-way thing that ideas are going from west to the east and the east is going to have to adopt things. This model very spectacularly collapsed quite some time ago. Agnieszka, you guys have always focused on your broader region, Europe as well and general international news but on the broader region, which Eastern European or Central European countries in the former Eastern Bloc don't really like to do. Kritika Poeticzna started in 2002. I mentioned this because there was the moment not so like 10 years, 14 years after the transition, after 1989 and the main narration was the narration that now the Eastern Europe joined the Europe. Now we need to be focused and almost many NGOs, many people like were focused on west. In Kritika Poeticzna, this Eastern tradition, this Eastern history was very important. The moment when we started was important but also that when we grown up we started to cooperate with some magazines, with some media from the region, from Eastern Europe, Central Eastern Europe. We tried to support each other. Even what we talked about the smaller media, as a smaller media we could exchange knowledge. We could ask even the simple question like, how do you do this? Working in the region and thinking that these cooperations are important, was important when we also cooperated with the magazines, organization, NGOs, cultural centers, cultural institutions from the Western Europe. I can use this experience when I think about how the bigger media work and the smaller media. How the media or the organization in capital city work or smaller cities work. When you are big you don't think maybe a lot about your audience, you need the audience to sell the commercials. When you are the smaller medium or medium size medium, you don't have this kind of challenges. Our audience is our partner, NGOs are our partner, activists are our partners. Readers of Kritika Poeticzna, they also want to engage in something and they look for information in your media. For me it's much more interesting to work on this kind of media and with this kind of community around. There are moments when the challenges we have like the money and how we can grown up and so on, how we can be sustainable. These challenges and these problems can be also the moment of finding completely new solutions. Big Kritika Poeticzna is an institution. I am a chief editor of online daily magazine but we also run publishing house. So we publish the book. So we are also part of the book market. We also run the institute. We run the social cultural centers and the possibility to use the knowledge from this different part of the institution gives us the chance to see really different perspectives. It can be inspiring for many, many people. There is an audience that are looking for that. Just to do like a closing ground I want to ask all of you whether you have one topic or one perspective that you would wish to put in front of every European to think about. I think I'm from Poland. For me this question is very simple. So for me the each time the perspective of young women this is the perspective I think like I always think about. I mentioned young because of the because of the demography right now in Poland the younger generation is like the smallest group let's say politicians are not very interested in them because they do not give them lots of votes and the women because women's right is still something we need to fight for. From my perspective I would like to see more outside Europe what's happening beyond the limits of Europe however you define it so that means more engagement, cultural engagement with Middle East, more cultural engagement with North Africa more cultural engagement with South Caucasus and Central Asia for example. All the Caucasus let's go crazy. Well let's bring them all in. And to me that's really interesting that's something that I hope we'll be pushing this year and moving forward. I guess just staying with the theme of elections or voting or politicians I'm very interested also coming from the US as I am of this idea of people voting against their own interests how the housing crisis which is affecting mostly capital cities is caused by investors coming in and kind of buying this up conflated with migration if there's too many people and not enough houses and then you see people coming in we could go one level deeper or maybe understand like root causes of things because I think many people might be surprised that the root causes not what they assume it would be for most of the problems we're facing. So the one topic that I would like to put in front of everyone it's many topics but the one that I would insist is housing, housing all over the place everything I have ever reported on regarding social issues always boils down to housing sex work boils down to housing access to housing affordability of housing homelessness well do I have to tell you about the demography at the same time so it's all over the place and this is somehow so criminally under reported in its actual depth I think we're all doing our worth in this field but it must be much higher on the agenda and of course it also has to do with climate thank you so much and you can see publishing from all of the guests and so many more on Display Europe and you can join my country talks and our article club as well. This program is presented by Eurazine an online magazine bringing you reads from more than a hundred partner publications and across dozens of European languages this talk show is a Display Europe production a content sharing platform which brings you content on politics in your community and so much more and somehow miraculously also doesn't abuse your user data shocker now if you want us to show you more of these cute animations or just like what you see and wish to support our work please go to patreon.com that is Eurazine the magazine presenting this show you can pledge as little as five euros a month or whatever you can afford and I promise we won't buy pickles from it instead you'll get access to bonus materials invitations to the taping of the show and even get to suggest topics and questions this program is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union and the European Cultural Foundation importantly views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers they do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or even the European Education and Culture Executive Agency neither the European Union or the EACEA can be held responsible for them I mean I do wish they took advice from us but apparently they just don't don't just see something online and start immediately touting it it's probably for the better