On 15 October, the President of the EP unveiled the names of the winners of the EP Prize for Journalism 2009. “Wily customers in Brussels honing their wits” is an article about lobbying in the EU by Hungarian journalist Bálint Szlankó and it took the honours in the internet category. He spoke to us about the role of lobbying, his research and the added value of the internet compared to other media and ways of improving the knowledge on the EU.

Your article is about lobbying, a subject that seems obscure to many people. Why did you decide to write about it and what is the main message of your article?

I wrote about lobbying because I think most people have a hostility to how lobbying works, you tend to think of obscure figures meeting in dark alleyways and sliding brown paperbacks to each other, full of money. I am sure that this sometimes happens.

I am sure that everywhere there is money and corruption involved in politics and I am sure the EU is no exception to that. But I wanted to make the point that much of lobbying is rather different from that and that it revolves around offering a compromise and study proposal and making intelligent or sometimes less intelligent arguments and conducting PR campaigns. I thought it is a great subject because there is very little written about it and I thought I would chip in.

Was it difficult to write and did it take a long time to gather all the material for the article?

Yes and no. No because I worked for 5 years as a correspondent for a Hungarian news agency so you will excuse me if I say I know a fair bit about the European Union as it is, and I had written about lobbying before, so I had sufficient background. But yes, you are quite right, in order to construct a proper article, you have got to go through a lot of interviews and those take time and you have to conduct long distance telephone calls and somebody will have to pay for those. So yes, but then again, it is only an article, so I don't want to exaggerate.

What does this Prize mean to you?

I am actually in two minds about it because receiving a prize for what is essentially a government agency may not be necessarily a good omen for a journalist, but it comes with a lot of money.

To what extent does the internet give added value to journalism, compared to other parts of the media?

I think the internet makes things a lot easier. It makes easier to get information and to get out information, to put your story out there and to reach more people and to involve people in how news is made and how news is disseminated. And I think it is great. What I often worry about is that more and more loud voices do not always contribute to a more informed debate, so having everybody coming and have their say will not necessarily result in a better outcome for that debate. I think it is a challenge to find solutions for that.

How can the media and the European Institutions provide people with more knowledge of European affairs?

I am not sure. I think any newspaper that takes its stuff seriously will have to have a Brussels correspondent. There is no other way in covering the EU properly than having somebody here to cover it. That is one thing. And European people will just have to try and make it interesting and create links between the readers and themselves, to explain the stories in a way that shows that Europe is important and it affects their lives in so many ways. It is hard, I know it very hard and I think we can only go this far because at the end of the day most people are really not interested in the EU frankly.