Pierre Louette, CEO of AFP: agencies still have role in age of free generation
Posted by Julian Evans on June 6, 2006 at 10:26 AM
Pierre Louette, the CEO of Agence France Presse, told the 13th annual World Editors Forum in Moscow that while news agencies like AFP faced new challenges from online innovations such as Google News, there would still be a role for agencies in the future, because they were reliable providers of factually accurate news.
He said: “One of the key challenges of the new era is to maintain the highest standards of verification. Everyone’s a news editor now. Everyone has their own blog. But consumers still want reliable, hard news, and we’ve been doing this for 170 years.”
He added that AFP had had to work to protect its interests in the new digital era, and was still in a dispute with Google News: “We’re not involved in the B2C [business to consumer] market, but are more B2B [business to business], so there’s no real reward for us in having our news on Google. And our business is very costly, and has never brought in high profits. We’ve paid to have people all around the globe. So I think we should be paid for that.”
Louette also mentioned a recent dispute between news agencies and FIFA, the world football governing authority, which tried to limit the amount of photos that agencies could send out to non-traditional media formats like mobile phones or the internet during football games. Louette says: “FIFA tried to say that mobiles and the internet were not media. But we’ve all seen how important these new forms of technology are to media. The World Association of Newspapers was very influential in protecting the access of news agencies in this instance.”
Louette mentioned several new initiatives AFP is introducing, such as a new mobile news system in Japan; an online educational system provided in several languages; and a variety of Flash products, particularly for football fans.
More news from the 59th World Newspaper Congress
And our video blog with Robb Montgomery and Visual Editors
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Left unexplained is how PMPs are going to receive wireless broadband in any kind of reliable and non-irritating way.
I wonder where the 3M units by 2007 estimate comes from. Microsoft, who's pushing them on anybody who'll have one?
Its a balanced article i must say!!