Press releases and newsletter

2011 : VIDEO COMES OF AGE AT AFP
• Video is now firmly established as part of AFP's news coverage:

- 150 to 200 videos a day in seven languages, twice the output of the previous year
- the first international news agency with full HD
- upgraded video output in Portuguese and Arabic
- a solid, quality client base includes Sky News, NBC, BBC, CBS, Yahoo, Russia Today, France's BFMTV and Orange
- Exclusive videos backed by our global network of journalists, which in the past year included a recording of the voice of Anders Behring Breivik during the shootings in Norway and images of repression from several reporting assignments in Syria.

• Production across the agency continues to flourish:
- delivering strong coverage across all formats on the major stories in a year particularly rich in news : Fukushima, the Arab Spring, the royal weddings in London and Monaco, the economic crisis, and the sex case that ended the political career of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
- the year's most downloaded picture, showing Moamer Kadhafi's body, which AFP were the first to transmit. AFP was also the first news agency to expose as fake a widely-circulated picture purporting to show Osama bin Laden after he was killed, and consequently did not move it to clients.
- a raft of exlusives in our coverage of Syria, Iraq, the Areva layoffs, the Bettencourt affair, the first news agency to report from the home village in Guinea of Strauss-Kahn accuser Nafissatou Diallo.

AFP JOURNALISTS ON THE GROUND AROUND THE WORLD
• From war in Libya to riots in Egypt and repression in Syria, the uprisings in the Arab world set their stamp on 2011. All these earth-shaking events were covered live by AFP, backed by the experience and professionalism of an established network of journalists in the region and with special correspondents on the ground. With 12 bureaus across the Middle East, AFP is the only international news agency with a presence in Syria and to have a bureau in the Libyan capital Tripoli.
• Earthquakes and nuclear crisis in Japan. Thirty-seven AFP journalists covered the earthquake and nuclear crisis on the ground in Japan. As well as an editorial team which temporarily relocated from Tokyo to Osaka, a dozen special correspondents covered the events from inside Japan's worst-hit northeastern zone. • The rugby world cup in New Zealand: AFP deployed a multimedia team of 30 journalists in text, photo and video to cover the competition from beginning to end.

INTERNATIONAL AWARDS
• Several AFP journalists were recognised with awards in 2011, including the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, British Sports Journalists Awards, White House News Photographers Association, NPPA Awards, etc. Time Magazine selected an AFP photo as one of its top 10 news images of the year.
• AFP journalists were awarded the Bayeux War Correspondents Prize and France's Albert Londres Prize.
• First prize for 3D Videography by the Asian Conference on Digital Media in Hong Kong.

INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE DRIVING POSITIVE RESULTS
• Sales performance will be higher than its main competitors, with revenue stable at 280 million euros compared to 2010 and a net profit of nearly 2 million euros. This performance is particularly noteworthy given that the agency faced significant unexpected costs in covering the Arab Spring, the Fukushima disaster, and the conflict in the Ivory Coast…..
• With the exception of the Middle East which experienced major upheaval, AFP forecasts a global revenue increase, particularly in South America (+3%), in Asia (+3%) and in Africa (+9%).
• Turnover increased due to growth in video (26%), the Internet Journal (10%) and to a lesser extent, photo (1.6%).
• The Agency increased its client base to 3,700 worldwide, a 35% increase in five years.