News

Foundation to partner Saudi institute

The AFP Foundation is to train journalists in Saudi Arabia under an agreement between its parent company, Agence France-Presse, and the newly established Prince Ahmed bin Salman Applied Media Institute (PAI) in Riyadh.

The agreement was signed on April 26, 2008, with Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the chairman of the institute set up to honour the memory of his late brother, Prince Ahmed. Global news editor Denis Hiault signed for AFP.

The PAI offers a wide range of training courses and hopes to attract journalists from Gulf states and other countries throughout the region, as well as from Saudi Arabia.

The first course to be taught by the AFP Foundation will be a specially designed programme in the Arabic language on media archives.

In addition to the traditional functions of archives as an institutional memory and a source of background material, the course looks at the place of an archive service within the editorial hierarchy, at different kinds of retrieval systems, at the limits and the benefits of the Internet, and at archives as a commercial resource.

The AFP Foundation will also provide courses to clients of the Prince Ahmed Institute on photo-journalism, on animated and still computer graphics and on media law and ethics as well as international standards in newspaper and agency reporting.