Dear EUobserver reader,
First of all, a disclaimer — or, rather, an explication. These are not, necessarily, the most-read EUobserver stories of the past 12 months. That metric gets too easily swayed by a rogue story going viral on Reddit for no obvious reason, or a headline on a piece catches fire, beyond what the actual piece, good as it may be, really merits (mea culpa for trying to come up with arresting but accurate headlines, an art form in itself.)
Instead, selected by our team of seven reporters and editors, these are the 10 tales we thought best showed the breadth, depth, and originality of EUobserver over 2023, and its quest for original, investigative, off-diary stories about Brussels, the member states, policy-making, social affairs, foreign affairs, migration and the environment — to name just four of our specialised areas of reporting.
We welcomed to the team this year Paula Soler, a Spanish journalist formerly of El Confidencial, and with her came a sweep of stories on workplace practices, union rights, the gig economy, a living wage, and all the sorts of bread-and-butter worker and consumer issues that so many other publications ignore in favour of a ‘top-down’ focus on commissioners, MEPs and ambassadors, or insider Brussels gossip (looking at you, Politico).
We also said goodbye to Eszter Zalan, our long-serving Hungarian reporter, covering rule of law in Poland and Hungary, as well as Brexit and LGTQI issues, who left to turn from poacher-turned-gamekeeper and a new job at the European Parliament.
As for the comment page, one of our best-read sections, I had published 295 op-eds in 2023, as of 10 December (so add another 10 to that tally), from around 3,650 received (and read!) — as well as commissioning, I receive an average of 10+ daily cold-call submissions, for a slot of one to two pieces maximum daily. To all those who didn’t make the cut, and got a polite ‘no’, I hope that goes someway to explaining why. There’s room (this is the internet, after all), there just isn’t time.
So let’s start with Eszter and Paula.
Matt Tempest