Agence France Presse

Agence France-Presse

• Founder: Charles-Louis Havas.
• Distinction: The world’s oldest international news agency.
• Primary products: Words, photos, and graphics for client media worldwide.
• Annual sales: $227.7 million.
• Number of employees: 1,998.
• Major competitors: Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International.
• President and CEO: Eric Giuily; Deputy Chief Executive/Managing Editor: Denis Brulet.
• Headquarters: Paris, France.
• Year founded: 1835.
• Web site: www.afp.com.


For most of the past 150 years, Agence France-Presse has been more accustomed to reporting news than making it. The oldest media agency in the world, it was first to announce the deaths of Joseph Stalin, Pope John Paul I, and Indira Gandhi. It broke the story when Israeli athletes were massacred at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It snag ged the first inter view with Mikhail Gorbachev when he survived an attempted coup in 1991. And it told the world about the car accident near its Paris headquarters that killed Princess Diana.
From inside coverage of Germany’s French occupation during World War II, through sustained reporting from contemporary hot spots like Chechnya, AFP has continually been on the scene, snapping pictures, and filing dispatches around the globe. It currently utilizes 200 photographers, 1,200 reporters, and 2,000 factfinders to cover France and more than 160 other countries. One of the world’s top such news organizations—along with the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) in the United States, and Reuters in Great Britain—it distributes some 250 photos, 80 graphics and two million words in French, English, Spanish, German, Arabic, and Portuguese everyday.
Yet there also have been times when, much to its own chagrin, AFP actually has made news. The earliest was probably in the 1940s, when underground journalists were joining forces to reformulate the agency for post-War France. The most tragic was certainly in the 1970s, when its chief editor was killed during a violent unionownership clash at the newspaper Parisien Libere (whose name means “The Free Parisian”). There have been headlines when personnel unselfishly put themselves at risk, such as the spring 2000 report of an AFP journalist missing on the Philippine island of Jolo during a hostage crisis. There are company-in-crisis stories—such as the one that same year revealing the economic woes preventing AFP from properly joining the online revolution.
But that’s the way it goes on the cusp of a fresh millenium. These days, it seems, even top media outlets can become the story as they struggle to cover and deliver the news of the day.

Agence France-Presse traces it roots back to 1832, when Charles-Louis Havas founded the Bureau Havas to translate reports from foreign newspapers and redistribute them to papers in and around Paris. A few organizations elsewhere had been performing a similar service since the 1820s, but Havas had grander ideas. In 1835, the so-called “father of global journalism” broadened his operation into Agence Havas and started transmitting some of the original news that he and his associates had been gathering first-hand. Ten years later, he established the first telegraph service in France, expressly to transmit these reports quicker.
One of Havas’ earliest employees was Paul Julius Reuter, who worked for him as a translator. Reuter left to establish a similar enterprise of his own, which he transferred to Great Britain in 1851 as the Reuter Telegram Company of London. (Then as now, it was more commonly known as Reuters.) Others, including AP and UPI in the United States, as well as national agencies in many European countries, followed suit over ensuing decades. Some began as translation services like Havas, or to provide financial data for local bankers. But most eventually moved like the French pioneer into gathering, writing, and distributing news from around a nation or the world to newspapers, periodicals, radio stations, and even government agencies that they signed up as clients.
Eying the increasing competition, Havas launched a complementary advertising service in 1852 called the Correspondance General Havas. At the same time, he started stationing staff correspondents around the world to gather even more original news. (The Havas operations merged in 1920 with another advertising company to become a significant player in that industry, but the prominence would eventually prove troublesome as its predecessor’s journalistic stature also grew.)
In 1879, Agence Havas became what in France was known as a “public limited company,” although it certainly showed no signs of any limitations. In fact, by the turn of the century, it was disseminating news from its unique perspective to an ever widening array of subscribers worldwide. Functioning as a cooperative, with participants supplying news for general use from their own areas, thus supplementing the reports from major bureaus staffed by its own personnel, the agency brought added services and widened coverage to media that otherwise never could afford it.
Unhappily for much of staff and management, that story was covered extensively in the world press during the new millenium’s earliest months. Most at Agence France-Presse would undoubtedly prefer that not be so, and that their agency returns just as soon as possible to covering the news instead of making it.