Section Agence France-Presse du Syndicat national des journalistes

SNJ-AFP

Agence France-Presse Branch of the French National Journalists' Union (SNJ)

News & Views

Journalists of the world, unite !

The SNJ herewith reaffirms its support for the anglophone journalists of Agence France-Presse and reaffirms that they enjoy exactly the same rights as all others in the agency as regards postings and promotions.

The strength of AFP, much more than its "Frenchness", is its capacity to bring together journalists from a variety of languages, backgrounds and cultures. We see this every day both in France and abroad. Instead of getting into a pointless controversy over a single job posting, the SNJ believes that the following issues are far more important:

- The danger the agency faces is not whether such and such a post goes to an anglophone or a francophone, a hispanophone or an arabophone. The danger is simply that jobs are being cut. AFP is adopting new media but at the expense of text, which is the agency’s core function and which will remain the backbone of the news wire for many years to come. The attempt to increase staff numbers in multimedia while keeping overall staff numbers constant leads to situations such as the loss of a francophone deputy job in London to enable the creation of a video coordinator job. This short-termism is the real threat to AFP, not the posting of journalists whose competence, whatever their native language, is proven.

- Why does management not put in place a coherent and efficient system of language training? How many journalists leave for a posting without having had the time or the means to learn the language of the country in which they will be working? And why is there no proper system in place to enable local non-francophone journalists to learn French, which many need to carry out their daily work? The budget and staff numbers of AFP’s training department are ridiculously small, while our competitors are light-years ahead of us on the training front.

- Why are many journalists off all languages denied the possibility of coming to Paris for a "stage" of several weeks or months, when this would greatly improve their integration into AFP and their understanding of French society? There is no system in place for such "stages" even though the demand for them is strong.

5 July 2010