Valentina Bonaccorso on why she made the move from Sicily to Brussels, and how she now has her ‘dream job’.
It is a long way from Catania to Brussels, and from the warmth of Sicilian family life to ceaseless contact with politicians, officials and media from across Europe. But it is a journey that Valentina Bonaccorso now feels she has made successfully.
As head of the Brussels office of the European Journalism Centre (EJC), she is at the hub of an operation providing high-level European policy seminars for hundreds of journalists every year, and running media training missions in the European neighbourhood and in developing countries.
Many of the seminars take place in Brussels, Frankfurt and Strasbourg, bringing journalists from the member states – and often beyond the EU’s borders – into close contact with experts. The subjects may range from frozen conflicts in Transdniestria and Nagorno-Karabakh to the global economic outlook and monetary challenges, from gender equality to climate change.
Many seminars include trips to countries where the EU has close trade or political or development links. “This is not propaganda for the EU,” insists Bonaccorso. Much of the EJC’s work is funded from multiannual contracts with the European Commission, but the role of the EJC is not to give a positive spin to what the EU is doing, she adds.
“We give media professionals the possibility to see at close quarters how the EU works, and to question the people who make policy and carry it out.”
Typically, the seminars take the form of a series of debates over three to five days, in discussions with MEPs, diplomats, officials, and campaigning groups. At a recent seminar, Andris Piebalgs, the European commissioner for development, gave journalists a preview of his development policy immediately before he went to the European Parliament to present it formally.
Bonaccorso thrives on the variety. In addition to managing the staff – which has grown to 12 since the EJC’s headquarters in Maastricht recruited her to open the Brussels office in 2005 – designing seminars and negotiating course content with sponsors, she also leads some of the courses herself.
Over the past couple of years she has shepherded groups of journalists around Armenia, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Moldova, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Ukraine.
She also organises media training sessions in countries around the world, with funding from member states.
“It is a dream job”, she says. “No one in my family had ever worked anywhere beyond Sicily, but even when I was a very young girl I wanted to travel, to learn other languages and cultures.”
While she was still an international relations student at Catania University, she worked as a journalist with the regional newspaper La Sicilia. An Erasmus year in Liège gave her a first taste of living abroad.
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She was soon back in Belgium, this time as an intern in the Commission’s secretariat-general.
“I was assigned to the taskforce on the future of Europe,” she recalls, “and that convinced me that I was in the right place.”
Resisting her family’s pleas to return to Catania, she took a job with the International Federation of Journalists in Brussels before joining the EJC. “It is a unique job,” she says, and she feels that her work there helped develop the debate on Europe.
“For me, it is important to promote that debate,” she says, with the enthusiasm she no doubt displayed as a stagiaire. “Because,” she adds, “it’s the quality of debate that will determine the future of Europe.”