A European Perspective: the future of news and debate in the EU

Věra Jourová is currently Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency and deals with democracy, rule of law, media pluralism and fight against disinformation. From 2014 to 2019, she served as EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality.
In 2014, before arriving to the European Commission, Ms Jourová held the position of Minister for Regional Development in the Czech Republic. Previous to this, from 2006 to 2013, she worked in her own company as an international consultant on European Union funding, and was also involved in consultancy activities in the Western Balkans relating to the European Union Accession.
She holds a Degree in Law (Mgr.) and a Master's degree (Mgr.) in the Theory of Culture from the Charles University, Prague

Noel took up the role of Director General of the EBU in September 2017.

Noel is the former DG, Managing Director of Television and Editor of Current Affairs of RTÉ, Ireland's national television and radio broadcaster. As Director General, he radically restructured RTÉ following the financial crisis that began at the end of 2008 and successfully positioned RTÉ as a robust digital media organization.

A strong and long-time advocate of public service media, Noel is also an award-winning investigative journalist and producer. As an editor and producer, Noel's programming won numerous awards for journalism. He was Executive Producer on a range of live television events, including the Eurovision Song Contest in 1997, general election coverage, live entertainment series and factual programming.

DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology.

He has been the Director for Media Policy at the European Commission since 2016. The Directorate is in charge of Copyright law; Broadcasting law; the MEDIA programme, which provides financial support to the European audiovisual industry and the fight against online disinformation. We elaborated and are now implementing the European strategy on countering fake news and disinformation.

Before then he was in charge of the Directorate responsible for the elaboration of the European Data Strategy. In former positions at the European Commission, he supervised and directed the elaboration of the European Cybersecurity Strategy and a European law on network and information security.

He worked many years in the Antitrust and Consumer Protection departments of the European Commission. As a result he has acquired extensive proven experience in handling complex merger, State aid cases and knowledge of consumer law.

Before joining the Commission he was an associate in an international law firm in Milan for four years (1989/1992), where he dealt mainly with commercial law and competition law.

He is the author of several publications mainly in English law magazines. He teaches media law to master students at the Bocconi University in Milan and give lectures and presentations on European law at several European universities.

Alex Agius Saliba (born 31 January 1988) is a Maltese politician who was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in 2019 on behalf of the Labour Party.

Agius Saliba was a journalist for 5 years before he graduated as a lawyer. Since then, he worked as a legal advisor to a number of Ministers, including Ministers Helena Dalli (Malta's European Commissioner) and Ian Borg, and Parliamentary Secretary Stefan Buontempo. He was appointed as Head of the European Union Secretariat in 2017 but stepped down to contest elections in 2018.

Agius Saliba, Vice President of the Socialists and Democrats at the European Parliament, was also appointed as rapporteur of the Digital Services Act and Common Charger (RED) by the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee and on the Right to Disconnect by the Employment Committee at the European Parliament. He was also appointed as the rapporteur on the protection of Persons with Disabilities by the Committee on Petitions.

Liz Corbin is the Deputy Media Director and Head of News at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). She oversees the Eurovision News Exchange, the Eurovision News Events broadcast services team, Radio News, and digital transformation projects. She is also regularly involved in advocating for public service media and trusted, quality journalism.

Liz joined the EBU in January 2020, coinciding almost exactly with the biggest global news story we’ve seen in years: COVID-19. For Eurovision News, the rapidly escalating situation meant a rapid change in working practices, as the team had to find a balance between workplace restrictions and technical challenges with the need to deliver creatively to an unprecedented demand for 24-hour coverage.

Says Liz of that time, “It was an extraordinary time because the absolute basics of broadcast journalism were tested. TV journalism is teamwork. People working physically close to each other, on the road, in the edit suite, in the studio. We had to switch to makeshift arrangements that, by necessity, had to frequently take place in people’s homes. Every part of the news operation had to be reimagined – but it also showed public service journalism at its best, when the need for trusted, reliable information had never been greater.”

Since then, Liz has overseen the Eurovision News response to the election of President Biden; the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban; the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; and, of course, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. All against a backdrop of changing work methods, evolving priorities and increasing pressures on public service newsrooms.

“No-one is in any doubt that we are living and reporting in a time where the sands shift so quickly under our feet, we often wonder how we remain upright at all! But change is not only necessary, it’s desirable. And it must be perpetual. For me, change brought me to this career in the first place. I never wanted a job that was the same, day in day out.”

Prior to joining the EBU, Liz worked at the BBC for 18 years, most recently as Head of News at the international channel, BBC World News. Previous roles include Editor of BBC Reality Check where she oversaw a large expansion in the team. She was also the BBC Singapore Bureau Editor for four years where she created an integrated newsroom.