Agence France-Presse on Monday named Florence Biedermann as its new chief editor.

The scholarship was launched this year to honour the commitment to journalism training of veteran AFP journalist Peter Mackler, who died suddenly in June, 2008. Mackler, who was AFP North Americas chief editor at the time of his death, was a founding board member of the AFP Foundation, which runs training programmes for journalists in the developing world.

Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world’s most far-reaching news agency, and Handmark®, a world-leading provider of games, applications and services for mobile phones, today announced they have partnered to launch a new mobile application, AFP Mobile News for BlackBerry® smartphone users.

The International news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP) and BNS, Asia’s leading IPTV technology and content solutions provider, have entered into a content distribution partnership to make AFP’s news content available on BNS’ in-room hospitality entertainment platform, RoomWise.

A “web 2.0” publishing applicationAFP’s new publishing application lets web and mobile operators handle AFP's multimedia content for the 2010 Winter Olympics and World Cup. The online application automates publication of AFP content (illustrated historical and biographical data, real time stories, results, photo slideshows, videos) and allows clients to customize multimedia feeds to publish HTML modules directly on websites or mobile websites. It can handle all of AFP’s multimedia content and allows the generation of a search engine (which can access all AFP production) and links from AFP content to social networking websites, as well as handling top online advertising formats.

Motion content from Agence France-Press is now available via Framepool.com. As a global news agency, AFP supplies comprehensive, reliable and independent reports from across the world. More than 40 international video production units produce a wide range of reports in 7 languages 24/7. These clips are now available via Framepool.com for further licensing and use by filmmakers. The marketing agreement between AFP and Framepool applies both to current and future material, as well as to motion content from previous years.

Launched at the beginning of the year by AFP and Relaxnews, the world’s first leisure newswire gets a promising early assessment despite the economic crisis.

J.S. Tissainayagam, a Tamil reporter and editor serving a 20-year prison sentence in Sri Lanka, was awarded the first Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism on Friday. His wife, Ronnate Tissainayagam, accepted the award, named for a 30-year veteran of Agence France-Presse who died last year, at a ceremony at the National Press Club.

AFP photographer Joe Klamar won the Picture of the Year award at the Czech Press Photo 2009 contest with a photo of US President Barack Obama taken during his visit to Prague in April, the organisers said Monday. An international jury selected a picture of Obama giving a speech as he gazed at the statue of the first Czechoslovak president Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), with the city skyline in the background hidden in fog.

AFP has joined forces with the Austrian news agency <a rel="external" href="http://www.apa.at">APA </a> to develop an Event Manager, a multilingual application for the editorial management of news events. It is one of the cornerstones of <a rel="external" href="http://www.afp.com/afpcom/en/content/news/project-rich-media-news">AFP's Rich Media News Agency Project </a>, an ambitious project to transform the agency and sharpen its multimedia edge.