POLITICO alerted me earlier in the week to the existence of a Brussels thinktank called EU Policies, of which I had not previously heard. POLITICO complained, reasonably enough, that one of the stories on the EU Policies site had been copied from them wholesale and without attribution.

The mission statement of EU Policies declares, “EU Policies is a european [sic] Think-tank. / Our focus is to promote successful policies, at a european [sic] level, always putting subsidiarity ahead.” The postal address given is a co-working space on the far side of Brussels from the EU quarter, which also offers a virtual office among its services. The thinktank has a Twitter account dating from last October, but no Facebook presence that I could detect.

Oddly enough, not a single one of the named editorial staff appears to have their own social media presence, whether on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. Googling their names individually, combined with the word “Brussels”, produces no results apart from the EU Policies website itself, and a gig date for a musician (an American drummer) with the same name as the Executive Editor. (At least one of the other names looks like it has been misspelled, but trying some of the obvious variations produced no better results.)

The site features banner ads for Euractiv’s daily news roundup, but I think it is very unlikely that there is any real connection there.

It is surprising that such an industrious team has so little visibility outside their own website. All very mysterious.