MEDIA COMMUNICATION. A CASE STUDY ON EUROPEAN UNION

On the one hand, professional media communication has been going through massive changes due to the digital technologies that had a major impact on media relations, on PR and news media industry, on media consumption and on access to information. On the other hand, European professional communication system has been changing rapidly during the last years due to both new trends in traditional journalism, media consumption behavior, and also due the euro-skepticism wave highly expressed through the 2005 French and Dutch rejection of the proposed European Union constitution. Consequently, European Union was forced to develop diverse communication tools that became generally available, addressing the wide, diverse and multicultural segments of European audiences. This proposed paper first presents a theoretical background on media communication and media relations techniques - referring to aspects like media institutions and newsroom, media targeted audiences. Further on, the article will look into some of the specific media communication instruments. The case study of this paper includes an analysis of the media communication of the European Union - the EU online newsroom which is the official news website of the institutions of the European Union and it provides online access to the latest official press material released by all EU institutions, as well as practical information for journalists. The EU newsroom provide live web TV coverage, audio, video and photo reliable archives, permanent updated press releases and much more, all for free.