At one level it has been a privilege to attend the Danish Presidency Press Trip for the past four days. I’m the first blogger ever to have been allowed to attend, and hopefully not the last. But the whole experience leaves me feeling a little empty, although not quite for the reasons that may be immediately obvious.
Sometimes unexpected doors open thanks to blogging, and next week is one of those circumstances. I am spending four days (Monday-Thursday) in Copenhagen on the Danish Presidency Press Trip.
Did you even know Presidencies organise press trips? I didn’t before getting the invite to this.
Anyway, what am I going to try to do? I have the advantage – unlike the rest of the regular journalists on the trip – that I do not have pieces to file to newspapers or radio. I can choose my take, write as little or as much as I like. I’m going to try to give an impression of how a Presidency works, my impressions of the ministers and their level of knowledge of their briefs, and try to determine some of the prospects for Denmark’s stint as Presidency for the next 6 months. The trip features – among other things – briefings with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Foreign Minister Villy Søvndal, Radikale leader Margrethe Vestager, Minister of Finance Bjarne Corydon and Europe Minister Nicolai Wammen. As well as blogging I’ll be tweeting on the hashtag #eu2012dk.
For the sake of openness: my accommodation in Copenhagen is being paid for by the Danish Presidency (and I imagine that is the case for the other journalists attending). I am covering the costs of my own travel. I am not paid to blog or report on this. I am invited to attend thanks to contacts I’ve made in the past with communications people in the Danish Presidency, both in Copenhagen and Brussels.
Comments and questions you would like me to pose are most welcome!
I know that Facebook numbers are not everything. It’s about change in the real world, activism etc.
But if at least clicking a ‘Like’ button on Facebook is some sort of symbol of political engagement, then this is how the Danish political parties stack up before the election due on September 15th. These figures are correct as of today, 31st August, and should be read against the checkfacebook.com stats for today showing 2723140 Danes have a Facebook account, and a population of Denmark of 5529888 according to the CIA World Factbook.
As well as the raw numbers I’ve added some activity scores from Facebook Grader and Momentus. The latter gives a more detailed breakdown of levels of activity on a page. These are of course no substitute for full research, but give a more complete picture than just totals numbers of likes.