Media: Scotching rumours

France's national news agency has appointed a new editorial head. And he's come all the way from Glasgow.

ON THE south side of the Place de la Bourse in Paris, in a beige stone edifice from where harried-looking workers scurry at all times of day and night, a lean, rosy-cheeked man of 44 walks into his glass-fronted office. On its door is the sign "Editor in Chief", and as the new incumbent settles into his leather chair each day, he may be reflecting on the singular nature of his appointment.

Eric Wishart, a father of two and a distinguished wire-service journalist, this month takes the top editorial post at Agence France-Presse, (AFP) France's national news agency. He is also as far from the idea of a French media supremo as it is possible to imagine.

Wishart is a full-blooded Glaswegian, son of a features editor on the Herald, a school-leaver at 16 who was educated on the Paisley Daily Express and taught himself French at Glasgow's Alliance Francaise. He has a reputation for being thorough, hard-nosed and uncompromising, but he is the first foreigner to have headed the world's oldest (and third-largest) news agency.

"It's like having a Frenchman as head of news at the BBC," said one senior agency journalist, incredulously. "It's put a lot of noses out of joint."

Wishart says he will take the whispering in his stride. "I was appointed because it was thought I was the best man for the job, not because I'm not French," he says, with a slightly ironic smile. His thick Glaswegian accent is already famous in the agency for being as heavy in French as it is in English.

Wishart has been with the agency for 15 years, serving as bureau chief in the Middle East and, most recently, as head of the Asian service, based in Hong Kong. He has a reputation for incisive, sometimes fierce editing that highlighted the difference in standards between the agency's English language wire and its original French service, which is one of the current sources of tension and speculation about the future.

AFP puts out its international news wire in five languages: English, French, Arabic, German and Spanish, but journalists are primarily either English- or French-speaking. The latter predominates, and often correspondents' stories are hurriedly translated into English in Paris and sent out on the wire, which competes for clients' attention with those from Reuters andAssociated Press.

"Eric's appointment is a sign that the management have finally crossed the Rubicon and acknowledged the English service is more important than the French," says a senior AFP journalist. "It's making a lot of waves, and tension."

Wishart won't comment directly on the French/English divide within the agency, but acknowledges that most of the expansion from now on will be on the English side.

"Websites and Internet service providers are becoming a very important market and we have to tailor ourselves to providing a service for them," he says. The Internet was initially seen as a threat to old-fashioned news wires: why pay thousands of pounds a month to subscribe to an agency when you can find out what's happening on the other side of the world on local websites?

Wishart, seen as forward-looking by AFP directors, says agencies will still be primary sources of trusted information for news media, and that the market for tailor-made news services is expanding fast.

"If a website wants a news service on a particular subject,to publish themselves, we can give it to them, very cheaply, over the Web." Gone are the days of the wire printer spewing out every story from around the world in the back office of a newspaper: now a tennis website based in Sydney can ask for a customised tennis news service, delivered cheaply over a secure Internet link.

Similarly, business websites can ask for a rolling news service of economics stories. "The idea of a net newspaper running real-time AFP stories isn't far away," says Wishart.

A senior French journalist at AFP says Wishart's appointment is an acknowledgment that the market for the original French service is saturated. "There's nowhere for us to expand in France, every newspaper takes AFP already."

But AFP, a proud French institution, funded partly by regional newspapers and partly by the government, was reluctant to abandon its roots. "It took years, and many missed opportunities, for management to recognise this."

It is also tacitly acknowledged that Wishart will demand more rigorous news writing from some of the French correspondents. As for his accent, Denis Brulet, an AFP director, comments: "Well, it's easier to understand him in French than it is in English!"

Wishart says the wire will concentrate on its "core strengths" of the Internet, IT and the photo service - which don't have any output in French. New jobs being created across the world by the agency are almost all for English speakers - Wishart says the Asia service, of which he was previously head, is run almost entirely in English.

The Francophone journalists at the Place de la Bourse may soon be asking themselves whether they have become second-class citizens in their own national news agency.