Reform of the Spanish text service: Lots of pain for little gain

What the reform of the Spanish text wire unveiled by management lacks in vision it makes up for in creating needless angst. It will not attain its stated objectives and raises serious questions about our leaders’ financial management, while depriving around thirty people of the meaning of their work. A harmful project that foreshadows a profound weakening of the AFP network.

In 2022, at the start of his second term as CEO, Fabrice Fries announced several strategic projects, including one that launched a review of our Spanish and LATAM coverage. This project remained under the radar until January 29, 2025, when management presented trade unions with a skimpy ten-page document with a shocking revelation: our Spanish text service is running a massive deficit and HQ-status jobs must go.

To save money, management plans to gradually transfer more than half of the HQ Hispanophone posts (general desk and Sport desk) to Bogota and Madrid. People will not be forced to move, but the posts shifted whenever vacated due to mobility or retirement. Two or three hispanophone expatriate posts, out of the current five, will also go.

The reason that this game of musical chairs is needed is that management has discovered that the Spanish text service, with its 94 journalists globally, ran a deficit of €7.6 million in 2023.

A project built on a shaky foundation

SUD takes issue with a purely financial examination of our Spanish text service. We have a public interest mission and public financing precisely because providing a complete news service is not profitable. Isolating the Spanish text service as management did – the first time it has ever provided such figures – is only of limited value as our products support one another. Moreover, certain contracts bundle our services. This is a useful practice to gain video clients but can result in cannibalizing our text revenues. The shock figure that management provided may reflect management’s commercial strategy and accounting practices more than anything else.

To cap it all, management said it was “surprised” to learn about the scale of the losses of the Spanish text service. How can this be a surprise when certain key executives have been in place since 2019? It raises questions about the quality of financial management.

After the presentation of its project to restructure the Spanish wire to the trade unions, management met with Hispanophone journalists in Paris and LATAM via video conference. Everyone hoped for explanations and reassurance about their fate. But they received quite the opposite: even more platitudes, uncertainties, and disdain.

The real objective: creating 8 to 10 video posts

Management’s mixed messages when it spoke with hispanophone text journalists left them in an anxious fog with little visibility about their future. Management had no concrete answers and no vision for the future of the service, apart from concentrating staff in Bogota, where salaries are notoriously lower. What needs to be done to improve our coverage and gain new text clients? What training will be available for text journalists to better meet the new needs of the agency? No answers to these questions. That is clearly because the real goal of the project is to transfer savings to create 8 to 10 video posts this year. They aren’t even in the official project, but in discussions management made clear that cuts to text services are needed to finance the expansion of our video services.

And management insisted that there is really no need to worry about having a smaller international footprint for our hispanophone network (currently 29 people) – it is confident that in the near future AI translation will reach a level where the original language of production will lose relevance. SUD views this as more frightening than reassuring, and not just for the Spanish-language service.

Just ‘getting rid of a small number of jobs’

For those on short-term CDD contracts, the most vulnerable and yet essential to the Paris services functioning, there were also no concrete answers although the posts they currently fill could possibly be transferred quickly. These journalists, some of whom have been working practically non-stop, were told to be “patient” and “flexible”, to “be open to different opportunities”, but that “adjustments” will be necessary. These journalists should be hired on permanent contracts for the commitment they have shown to the agency.

Management also had the nerve to say hispanophone journalists should show gratitude since its reform is only a lesser evil: it is only about "getting rid of a small number of jobs" and there will be no forced moves within three years, as is the case with the closure of Nicosia. An employer with heart!

Concerning the expatriate jobs to cut (Brussels and New York, and possibly London), nothing seems terribly clear in the mind of management. When confronted with strong arguments to keep these posts, management said it could consider closing others. Concerning the transfer of the sports jobs from Paris, management wasn’t insistent either. It’s open to discussion.

While management’s flexibility may be well intentioned, the uncertainty creates anxiety and suffering for our hispanophone colleagues who feel their future is hanging by a thread. Already frustrated by a diminished number of posts in the network, plus the drying up of foreign reporting missions (which management refuses to acknowledge), HQ-status hispanophone journalists see their career opportunities as disappearing.

Zero-cost redundancy plan?

To try to reassure them, the management then conjured up a mirage: as it sees languages mattering less and less, hispanophone journalists are invited to apply for management positions in the network. Your applications are welcome! You just need to have the soul of a manager... and sharp elbows to beat out competition from anglophone and francophone candidates for prized posts.

If hope sustains life, the lack of perspective causes suffering. Management showed no consideration for HQ-status employees who are already struggling with a reduction of staffing (departures not replaced) and some staff working three weekends a month. It also neglected, as it did for Nicosia staff, the impact of a move on the lives of employees. For HQ-status staff going to Bogota on a local status contract doesn’t attract many people... And for good reason! It’s a huge loss of income. But at the end of the day, what is management’s goal? To relocate HQ-status hispanophones or sideline them? Already anxious, depressed and worn out, is it to make them see so little meaning in their work that they resign? This looks like a zero-cost redundancy plan.

Low-cost Spanish service

As for the claimed objective of ensuring "the sustainability of the [Spanish text] service by reducing its cost and by redirecting its content towards the needs of the Latin American clientele," we doubt it will achieve the first objective. Management itself admits that its reform may take a long time to produce the desired savings if staff refuse to move. And even when fully implemented it would only save 2.5 million euros per year, which is about a third of the current "deficit" of the Spanish text service. That doesn’t sound sustainable to us.

SUD deplores that the only vision management has for the future is to always do things cheaper. Can AFP only survive by sacrificing its employees? Staff working in other languages must fight alongside their Spanish-speaking colleagues to preserve their professional opportunities. Management is creating a low-cost Spanish service with little mobility. Sooner or later, management will roll out the same arguments and use the same methods against other services in other languages. The result will be the same reduction of opportunities.
SUD calls on management to return to the drawing board and this time include the concerned staff in drafting a plan to reorganize our Spanish service.
We need to reject any reforms that put our international network at risk!

Paris, February 7, 2025
SUD-AFP (Solidarity-Unity-Democracy)