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After the Bouygues Affair: Time to Go Back to Basics!

Monday 9 March 2015

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A catastrophe foretold. For years we have denounced the gradual abandonment of the principles upon which the agency was founded as well as a deterioration of both working conditions and editorial standards, while CEO Emmanuel Hoog has had his sights set more on promoting the “AFP brand” and supposedly bringing the agency into a brave new digital age. And voilà. A series of errors, both individual and systemic, occurring on a weekend during the French school holidays led to an "industrial accident" that has in one fell swoop destroyed management dogma and the CEO’s laborious PR efforts.
The agency failed to get it right and failed in its public service mission in wrongly announcing the death of French business magnate Martin Bouygues, based on incorrect information and a weak source. The false scoop was not "above all the result of individual errors" but a symptom of a media sector in crisis.

To read our statement in full:

http://sud-afp.org/IMG/pdf/20150312_afp_sud_crisis.pdf