There is no more exciting or important moment to be a journalist

Phil Chetwynd, AFP News director was the Sciences Po 2024 inaugural Lesson guest on Thursday, September 26th to address the 2024-2026 cohort an optimistic and realistic message about journalism, highlighting why he thinks that there is no more exciting or important moment to be a journalist than now. Agence France-Presse is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. "In a world of polarization, fake news and opinion, reliable information has become a rare occurrence", says Marie Mawad, Dean of the Sciences Po Journalism School. Around 200 students and guests were present in the Leroy Beaulieu amphitheater, at 27, rue Saint Guillaume, on the Paris Campus. The lecture was followed by a Q&A session with our students. 

"I do love positive moments like a university start. At AFP, we benefit every day from the teaching of Sciences Po and this Journalism School. Many of your graduate students do work in our offices. To all of you, I want to tell you that you have taken a steep path to be here: you have unwavering determination. You have shown discernment and understood that a career in journalism is not the easiest. But it has the potential to be rewarding and I really value your courage and strength."

Here are the main take-aways from the Inaugural Lesson: 

• Society needs you journalists more than ever: quality journalism has never mattered more. The profession is facing so many hurdles. We need to hold power into account and cover corruption. During the Olympics, AFP provided facts, human stories. Journalism is vital to a functioning society. Lies spread 6 times faster than facts. AFP has 150 people who work to counter lies and debunking fake news. Maria Ressa says "an invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem". According to the Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is as much of a dictator as Rodrigo Dutertre she fought against in the Philippines. Journalism is more than a job. It needs to be protected. I firmly believe that a crisis is an opportunity. 
• People do not want to pay for news: 70% in the 20 richest countries in the world pay for news. The referral traffic from social media has collapsed. How do we engage young audiences is a key issue. You can do excellent journalism on youtube. You do not have to bring the young to existent media necessarily. 
• Always get a chance and do something that you never thought of doing. There is no more exciting or important moment to be a journalist than now. I became a journalist because of Nelson Mandela. I grew up in South Africa and it felt impossible to be a journalist. But the civil society really cared about what was happening in the country. Humility always struck me whenever I met a colleague. I really valued journalism that was going against the official narrative saying that "Mandela was a terrorist". So I went to Journalism School in the UK and learnt how to be a news reporter. One day, I got a phone call to work in Nairobi. Actually, it was Nicosia, an island in the middle of nowhere... And it was fantastic! As young journalists, you can not make mistakes. Everyone does, but you have to be out there quickly and apologize. I genuinely think the context has made us much better because of that pressure. We need your generation to take on the flame!
• AI challenges the business model and we do not know what impact it will have on news consumption. Translation and transcriptions are helping journalists to work better. We bring creativity. This is our added value as journalists. In 2024, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize with an amazing work where IA helped a lot. The visual investigations desk trained a model to identify 2,000-pound bomb craters in areas marked as safe for civilians in Gaza. We use IA to improve what we do. However, how will we do journalism in 5 years? I have absolutely no idea. Watch the AI video.
• Populism and autocracy: journalists are under immense pressure in India, Latin America and the United states. Many journalists were injured or killed last year in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Lebanon. We had to evacuate correspondents and exfiltrate another one from Moscou. One of our journalists was jailed for 10 days in Syria. We receive death threats every day. Opponents are threatened as well.
• The magic of AFP when it was created, was to be in the background. Since the internet, we are at the core of everything, 24hours a day. The whole idea was brought up before the internet, and today it is very ambitious. Do check our latest video for the 80 years of AFP.

Phil Chetwynd is the Director of News at Agence France-Presse. A British national, a professional journalist for over 25 years, and a graduate of the University of Wales in Cardiff, he cut his teeth in the British regional press before joining AFP in 1996. His career as a reporter in AFP's international network has taken him to the Middle East, Europe and Asia, as well as on assignments in around twenty countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel and the United States. Between 2002 and 2012, he worked in Hong Kong, at AFP's Asia-Pacific headquarters, as regional editor-in-chief. He also held the position of central editor-in-chief of AFP, at its Paris headquarters.