On a typical day, I wake up at a shockingly late hour for a full-time job by American standards: 8:30am. While I had anticipated the EFJ to operate from 9-5 or at even 9-6, my coworkers state that nobody truly comes until 9:30, and supervisors don't trickle in until well past 10am or 11am. Each time I find myself running "late," by my barely-punctual definition only to be one of the first in the office, I am reminded that the culture surrounding work here is far more relaxed and open to individual comfort and wiggle room than in NYC's fast-paced "hustle culture." So each morning at around 9:10am, after preparing breakfast, I take a calm stroll 25 minutes to the office. Every Monday, our team has an hour+long all-staff meeting where we review our updates, challenges, and victories from the past week, and discuss the agenda for the following week. This time of year, my coworkers are often busy organizing or attending international conferences in places like Paris, Ankara, or (I forget the city in) Greece. As a result, the past week or so I have been left in a half-empty office, joining Zoom calls with supervisors and having long lunch conversations with coworkers I otherwise would not get the chance to talk to.

While I don't have any pictures of my workplace, I do have an elevator mirror selfie just before entering the office, and two pictures of some cafes where I have enjoyed my work from home days on Fridays!

Because my supervisor was on holiday for the past week, she sent me and the other intern to attend the launch of an app called WSocial, which aims to be a new ethical and human-centered form of social media (quite similar to X actually...) at the Brussels Press Club with a host of journalists and media/tech policy experts from across Europe. The presentation led me to consider the rapidly growing intersection of journalism, tech policy, and digital media: how journalists can consider to protect their livelihoods and defend the societal ideals of media pluralism and the free press while evolving, rather than resisting, an increasingly digital, algorithmically-driven world. Rather than viewing these as separate domains, I am coming to find that they are inextricable from one another: we can't imagine a future for journalism without envisioning its place on social media and in the digital sphere broadly, and we can't think about innovation and platformisation without the necessity for media pluralism, and for credible journalism to report truthfully on their developments and ethical implications.

Since the beginning of the project, I have developed a clearer idea of how I will contribute to the public service media campaign the EFJ is conducting. My role is in supporting the compilation of fact sheets and research that will be used in the campaign, as well as in writing press releases for the EFJ website with updates about threats to PSM. I am also beginning to serve as a liaison between journalists in the countries whose PSM are critically under attack, communicating with them to learn more about the situation in their country and incorporating their testimony into information for the campaign.

Despite the absence of some coworkers this week, I have felt a clearer direction than before about where I can contribute, and feel myself growing more and more knowledgable about the state of European politics broadly. While American political hegemony has rippling effects all over the world and is naturally a topic of conversation throughout the EU, it is rare to find serious concern for EU politics among non-Europeans within the US. At the same time, the issues facing both have grave overlaps, and I hope to bring both perspectives to whichever country in which I continue advocacy work or even just engage in political conversation.