The Brussels press corps is not shrinking in bodies. It is shrinking in owners

That was the blunt reading that emerged on Monday when the International Press Association (API/IPA) hosted a discussion of Live from Brussels II, the Council of the EU’s new study of accredited correspondents, published on 8 July and written with Professor Sophie Lecheler of the University of Vienna. It updates the 2021 survey. The official finding is almost soothing: the number of accredited journalists has stayed “roughly constant” over five years. The number of media organisations active in Brussels has fallen. The room treated that gap as the story.

Romain Sadet, head of media relations at the Council, did not dispute it. He acknowledged a “big concentration, consolidation, to the detriment of smaller newsrooms.” Journalists around the table put names on the winners: Politico.eu, Euractiv, Contexte and a handful of other EU-specialised machines that can staff the Berlaymont, the Justus Lipsius and the Parliament on the same afternoon. Independent titles and freelancers, they said, are the ones disappearing from the corridor. Several argued that the trend accelerated after Covid, when remote briefings and thinner travel budgets made a Brussels bureau look like a luxury rather than a civic necessity.

API president Dafydd ab Iago struck a similar note, without turning the study into a lament. “The study covers an immense amount of territory. But I’d still say journalists in Brussels have a good thing going,” he said. “Imagine if the EU institutions, like the White House, had a media offenders list.” The worry, for him, is who still gets to use that access. “The declining number of news outlets is a concern. Is EU reporting becoming the domain of an ever-smaller number of major outlets, to the detriment of smaller newsrooms?”

The geography on the accreditation list makes the same point in numbers. France (31), Germany (40), Italy (32) and Spain (33) still field dense detachments. Slovakia has two accredited media, Romania three, Estonia one, Latvia two, Lithuania two. Cyprus, which recently held the rotating presidency, has one. Ireland, which holds the present one, has three. The imbalance survives, speakers noted, despite years of institutional help for presidencies. Worse, journalists from the under-represented countries said that the few badges that do exist often sit with state-owned outlets. Independent reporting from those capitals, they argued, is close to nil in the EU quarter.

That is not a footnote. If most of the Union’s smaller and eastern members are covered from Brussels by a public broadcaster and a specialist newsletter, national publics do not get a second look at the same file. The press corps still “represents” Europe on paper. It does not represent it in the same way in the newsroom.

The study itself is more cautious than the discussion. Correspondents, it finds, still live off the institutions’ press services: off-the-record briefings, press releases, background notes, and the press work of member states. Private messaging apps have become central. Social media remains unavoidable, but attitudes toward it have grown more ambivalent since 2021. Disinformation is treated as a major threat; many reporters say they meet false or misleading material often. AI has moved from experiment to habit.

What the paper does not cover is the Council’s other experiment with “new audiences.” From this summer the institution has been piloting access for national social-media creators at leaders’ summits and some ministerial meetings: they may attend press conferences and doorsteps, accompanied at all times, without the right to ask questions and without being treated as media for accreditation purposes. Member states were told to pick creators who had not published views “against EU values” and who were not tied to large commercial brands. API opposed the scheme when it was announced, arguing that clicks are not a substitute for a newsroom’s ethics rules.

Ab Iago returned to that gap on Monday. “Another question, for me, is not addressed by the study: the role of influencers, particularly in light of the Council’s new pilot project granting social media content creators and influencers access to official summits and press facilities,” he told EUalive. The distinction, he said, is who pays whom. “EU-accredited journalists go through a rigorous accreditation process to ensure their income comes from professional media organizations. We’re not paid by companies or governments to ask the ‘right’ questions or produce flattering videos. Influencers are under no obligation to disclose who pays them.” Even if they stay silent at the microphone, they still take up space. “The presence of influencers will place additional pressure on photographers, camera crews and reporters in already overcrowded spaces during doorsteps and press conferences, even if they are not permitted to ask questions.”

The survey numbers aired in the discussion make the AI chapter look slightly absurd. A majority of journalists – 60 per cent – disagree that AI improves the quality of their work. They also admit they use it more and more. The profession, in other words, has adopted a tool it does not trust, because the alternative is to fall behind a competitor who does.

On disinformation the hierarchy of remedies is equally revealing. Journalists put media literacy first (62 per cent), then proactive correction of falsehoods (60 per cent). Independent fact-checking organisations come next (38 per cent), ahead of stronger EU rules for platforms (37 per cent). AI tools for fact-checking finish last, at 11 per cent. The people who cover the Union do not want a chatbot to save democracy. They want readers who can read, and editors who still correct.

None of this is a surprise to anyone who has watched a freelance contract die quietly after a summit week. The Council study is useful because it puts official language on a change the corps has been living: headcount stable, organisations fewer, sources more institutional, tools more automated, and the map of Europe still drawn from Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid. What API’s discussion added is the political consequence. Consolidation is not only a media-market story. It is a story about who is allowed to explain the EU to whom – a salaried correspondent, a state channel, a newsletter with three bylines, or a creator who need not say who paid for the flight.

Caption: The discussion organised by API/IPA in Brussels on 31 August 2026 [Photo credit: API/IPA]