Exclusive / Euractiv relaunches as ‘Rapporteur’ in Brussels - Semafor

The Brussels news organization known as Euractiv will relaunch Tuesday as Rapporteur, its CEO René Moerland told staff Monday, as competition intensifies for wall-to-wall coverage of EU politics. 

The newsroom, founded in 1999, has rebooted in recent years as a competitor to Politico Europe, which took the market by storm in a partnership with Axel Springer in 2015. Moerland told Semafor that Euractiv’s rebrand is a mark of the organization’s commitment to journalism and that it would find advantages in the fact that its parent company, Mediahuis, is a European firm with reach across the continent.

“We are not connecting a city anywhere in the world to DC and then to Brussels. Our focus is on European decision making,” said Moerland, who described the new brand as “a bet on deep human reporting.”

Mediahuis, the Antwerp-based media company (whose chairman Thomas Leysen is an investor in Semafor) has built the staff up to 50 journalists and poached writers from the competition since acquiring Euractiv in 2023. One of those writers, Eddy Wax, wrote Monday that the company had once been known as the Yellow Submarine, “thanks to its lurid colour scheme – and perhaps its habit of sinking below the radar.” Now, he added, they’re building “a heavyweight outlet fit for the modern age. Proudly European, fiercely independent and serious in tone and approach.”

The site’s new name was the subject of rolling speculation in Brussels media circles, including a rumor that it would be named, simply, “Y.”