• 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.
Agence France-Presse:-
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.
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