Having said that, you can't criticise the EU for lousy PR and then also criticise them when they do launch an initiative like this in an attempt to boost voter turnout.

Yes you can, because if the goal was to boost voter turnout, the initiative has been a total PR failure.

You don't boost turnout by farming journalists - you boost it by giving the journalists something exciting and involving to report.

So many EU initiatives, from Lisbon down, seem frankly Weimar-ish - well meaning and not entirely a bad thing in theory, but politically naive and disconnected from the interests of their constituencies.

Where are the pro-EU op-eds? The counter-attacks in the Anglo press which report on and support EP legislation? Where are the EU critiques of the Anglo consensus?

These are all happening in blog space, where they're reaching a small but interested audience, but they're almost non-existent in mainstream journalism.

So a conference to promote more of the same when the pro-EU action is happening elsewhere can hardly be considered a success, surely.