French regional paper drops AFP service, will others follow?

Posted by Emma Heald on June 18, 2009 at 4:12 PM

French regional La Provence just announced that it is dropping its subscription to the Agence France-Presse news wire. The paper came to the decision after realising that it uses only 20 dispatches per day for an annual cost of 550,000 euros, a journalist for the Marseille-based paper told Le Monde.

AFP CEO Pierre Louette played down the announcement and said he is ready to negotiate. "I am not convinced that the rupture with La Provence is definititive," he commented. "We are ready to make an effort for the regional press, which we feel bound to almost like a cooperative." In fact, six out of the 15 members of AFP's board are from the regional press. However, it represents only 7% of the organisation's turnover.

Another unnamed boss of a regional paper said that his paper "could do without the AFP," by prioritising local content, signing an agreement with a pure player information site, or creating a bank of interregional data, like that which already exists for photos. "My paper keeps the AFP because the editors find it more convenient," he said, but added that "if revenue starts to fall, it will be the first thing to go."

The group Est Bourgogne Rhone Alpes, which owns 10 dailies, has negotiated a 20% discount on the AFP service, despite the agency's board's decision in December 2008 to increase rates by 2.5%.

Across the Atlantic, one of AFP's main competitors, the Associated Press, has just announced plans to lower its rates for member newspapers next year, even after lowering them this year. It appears to be an attempt to keep customers, as its member newspapers struggle financially. Several papers have decided to cancel their membership of the news cooperative, and papers in Ohio, for example, have started content sharing between themselves.

Similar to AP executives, Louette has threatened those who reuse his organisation's content without permission. The AP is pursuing an initiative to track its content more closely online, and many other news outlets are planning similar moves, with the formation of the Fair Syndication Consortium, for example.

According to Le Monde, AFP is trying to negotiate a "radical change in direction," trying to change its current corporate status which Louette believes does not give the agency a chance to reinvent itself or redevelop. He estimates that the organisation needs 65 million euros, in addition to the 30 million which has been invested in a new multimedia production unit. In order to raise this, he wants the agency to become a company. Louette put a proposal before the government on 31 March and the government will decide by the end of July.

The challenges that news agencies face are similar to those of newspapers, as they depend on all types of news outlets as customers.. But the financial difficulties in which papers find themselves can actually work in agencies' favour, as some publications choose to make cuts in their own reporting and hence rely more on wire services. And as the Economist pointed out in February, there are other services that agencies can provide: Reuters has managed to supplement its revenue from news stories with that from providing information to financial-services firms.

Source: Le Monde