Life after Helsinki 2007 Eurovision

Rolf Liebermann, Clifford Brown, Frank Naef, Christian Clausen, Christine Marchal-Ortiz, Svante Stockselius, Jon Ola Sand and .... ? After Rotterdam 2020 we will have a new Executive Supervisor, who to part of fandom is the evil and devil in person and to the rest of us the face of the voting and results. With the millenials and today's fandom Jon Ola and Svante have been blamed in person for most everything imaginable, but the truth is that Svante (2004-2010) and Jon Ola (2011-2020) have managed to give the contest a breath of life and made it more popular than ever. And today's fanboys have no idea who the ones before where, if not for the legendary "Mr Naef, Mr Naef..."  episode in Rome 1991. Svante introduced the semi-finals that saved us from the insane rules of staying home the year after if you did bad (perfect way of ruining anyone's interest at home if you had to sit away every other year, like Finland) or random semi regional pre-selections, and intro...

  Oh wow, that's what I thought without a hint of jealousy. Sietse Bakker has been appointed as the Executive producer event for the Eurovision song contest 2020's core team. He is joined by Inge Van De Weerd as Executive producer TV and two debuty Executive producers Emilie Sickinghe and Jessica Stam. Sietse started his Eurovision journey as 18-year-old by founding esctoday.com in 2002, one of the first and biggest Eurovision fan sites then, and this blogger had a pleasure to work with them back in the day. Four years later he moved on to work within EBU and eurovision.tv site before becoming Junior Eurovision Event supervisor for two years. And now he takes on the task of Eurovision 2020 in his home country. Congratulations and good luck with the job!

Douze points, twelve points is a new Dutch book about Eurovision by Geert Willems. It was presented this Sunday in the city of Nijmegen. My bicycling reporter Robert was present in the party - and is present in the book as well! You can whine and make fun of the Eurovision Song Contest but in The Netherlands (and many other countries) it is a national public entertainment. The final in May last year was the most-watched television broadcast of 2013. The song festival phenomenon deserves serious consideration. Therefore Geert Willems, a journalist of the newspaper "De Gelderlander" came up with the idea to write a serious book about the contest.  Prejudices around and about the festival are rarely based on facts . Douze points , twelve points will change this ! Willems writes about how the festival has played a role in the unification of Europe, the relations between East and West and how the festival plays an important role in the emancipation of the g...

Norwegian Jon Ola Sand takes over the post as Executive Supervisor taking over from Swedish Svante Stockselius who turned Eurovision upside down in a good way during his over 8 years in the job. Let's see what kinf od new ideas Sand has... surely he's not stepping into easy boots. Some 40 people from 10 countries applied for this prestigious and unique job. At the same time Sietse Bakker has been appointed as Event Supervisor for the Eurovision song contest, underlining the fact it's not only a TV Show anymore but an Event! Congratulations both and tack för allt, Svante!

In short: a 16 year old Sietse Bakker founded esctoday.com back in 2000. In six years it had become the Eurovision site, source of information and meeting place for the fans. Even EBU noted it and asked him to go and develop Eurovision.tv. So at 22 he went on to make a real makeover and facelift to that official site. And now at 26 he is nominated in his native the Netherlands for the Communication talent of the year award. "I think you can only be successful if you do what you most like. To me, that has proven to be a valuable goal, both when developing myself as well as while working with an amazing team of volunteers from all over Europe," Sietse Bakker said in the interview with the award organisers, adding that he is "grateful to take part in this election because honestly, I rather let others judge if I am good at what I do than spreading the word myself."  Vote for him here .