Agence France-Presse

Agence France-Presse is one of the three great international news agencies, employing about 1,320 staff journalists and photographers and almost as many regular freelance contributors around the world. With more than 110 bureaus outside France, it is able to report from every country, providing news to subscribers directly in eight languages.

Charles Havas AFP is heir to the oldest international news agency, founded as Agence Havas in 1835 by a French translator, Charles-Louis Havas. The first despatch bearing the name Agence France-Presse was filed by a body of journalists in the French Resistance who seized control of the agency's headquarters on August 20, 1944, and proclaimed its freedom in the Liberation of Paris.

The re-born agency was established by an Act of the French parliament in 1957 as an independent, impartial news provider to subscribers in France and around the world, its independence guaranteed in law from both private and state interests.

AFP's mission is defined by its statutes: to report events, free of "all influences or considerations likely to impair the exactitude" of its news and "under no circumstances to pass under the legal or actual control of an ideological, political or economic group."

Corporate strategy is the responsibility of the chairman and chief executive, who reports to a supervisory board of 15 administrators: eight representing the French press, two from French public radio and television, two members of the staff of AFP, and three representatives of French government departments that subscribe to its services.

The firm set up by Charles-Louis Havas to provide a daily digest of news from French and foreign journals has evolved into a global and multi-faceted communications company. Its subscribers include newspapers and broadcasters but also websites, telephone companies and public screens; they receive a wide range of services from carefully edited news wires to photos, news graphics (still and animated), audio, video and multimedia products.

Global reach, local knowledge

AFP prides itself on its distinctive international character, which comes in part from the nature of its reporting network and can be summarised as global reach with local knowledge.

Its traditional news wires provide information in English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German and Portuguese, while its online services also reach subscribers in other languages including Japanese and two forms of Chinese. Reports from AFP correspondents are translated into dozens of other languages by clients for their local readership.

News is edited, not at a single world desk at AFP headquarters, but in five autonomous regional centres in Hong Kong, Paris, Nicosia, Montevideo and Washington, responsible respectively for the coverage of Asia, Europe and Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and North America.

Each of these regional centres has its own budget, administrative director and chief editor. While they coordinate with the head of news and the editor-in-chief in Paris, particularly on the coverage of major news stories of worldwide interest, the regional desks are uniquely able to focus on stories of special interest to subscribers in their part of the world.

AFP's English-language products include between 800 and 1,000 news stories and a dozen still graphics daily and more than 100 videos per month for the television service launched in January 2007. We also produce animated graphics for use by television stations and websites.

The text news service includes spot news, features, analyses, background stories and scene pieces. We inform clients of upcoming events with regular news-agenda items and of our filing plans with daily news-advisories. We also provide news summaries.

AFP services are increasingly integrated and can be tailor-made to individual client's needs. We push out our full story production on 'wires' delivered to our major clients by satellite feed, but many clients today want more selective feeds, and take news for the Internet, or via topic-specific selections akin to RSS feeds. Multi-media desks in Washington, London, Hong Kong and New Delhi compile and package integrated news services for Internet clients.