Correspondent / behind the news

Gathering news in Syria has become a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, assignment, whether for foreign correspondents, Syrian reporters or a growing legion of 'citizen journalists' who relay what they witness via Facebook and Twitter. AFP has recently tightened its rules for fielding reports from Syria, part of an effort to avoid undue risk. (AFP Photo/HO/Youtube)

“We knew we were getting too close to the story when the photographer shadowing the pope called the office shouting, ‘He's walking, he's walking!’,” recalls AFP correspondent Gina Doggett, who flew into Rome to cover the ritual-laden selection of a new pontifex maximus. Even hard-bitten journalists, she reports, were in danger of losing themselves in pope minutiae. (AFP Photo/Gabriel Bouys)

The burgeoning realm of digital diplomacy – in which Hugo Chavez played a leading role – is coursing with observations, comments and speculation as Venezuela prepares to lay it’s president of 14 years to rest on Friday. Here is a sampling of the tweets generated by AFP’s the e-diplomacy hub, a Twitter-based application powered by a database stocked with 4,500 individually validated accounts, making it a Who’s Who of foreign relations in the era of social networks. (AFP Photo/Marvin Recinos)

The case of New York’s would-be ‘cannibal cop’ is an all-you-can-bleat feast for the city’s hardboiled headline writers: “Cop Fantasy: She’s Kebab”, “Chef of Police,” “Knaw and Order,” “Finest Young Cannibal” are some of the morsels served up so far. But there's a legal conundrum too: can one be tried & convicted for a fantasy, no matter how twisted? AFP correspondent Sebastian Smith taste tests the story. (AFP Photo)

Stumbling across websites in French on the highly-charged subject of abortion that seemed to be neutral but were anything but led AFP reporters Julie Charpentrat and Isabelle Tourne to dig deeper into the increasingly sophisticated tactics of France’s anti-abortion activists, who have clearly taken a page from the playbook of their US counterparts. 

Tunisia's capital has come to a near standstill on Friday, paralyzed by a general strike and the burial of an opposition leader whose murder has plunged the country into political crisis and a new cycle of violence. Diplomats, experts and activists are expressing and exchanging views on Twitter as the funeral procession unfolds. Here's a sampling of real-time tweets on Tunisia drawn from the 4,500 hand-picked Twitter accounts embedded in AFP's the e-diplomacy hub.

Agence France Presse has designed a tool to monitor what the world’s top foreign policy actors – from presidents and diplomats to experts, activists and even illegal armed groups – are saying on Twitter about breaking news.  Whether the civil war in Syria, the French incursion into Mali or VIP chatter at Davos, AFP’s Tweet Wire opens a real-time window onto the realm of digital diplomacy. The tweets are generated by AFP's The e-diplomacy Hub, a Twitter-based application powered by a database with 4,500 individually-validated accounts -- a Who’s Who of social network-based international relations.

"Why do I create excessively-long alpha-numeric passwords and back up all my data like a maniac to different online and offline locations?", AFP Baghdad Bureau Chief Prashant Rao asks. An avid blogger, Rao spends his downtime learning how to leverage the Web as a journalist. While teaching a week-long course on digital skills, he was attacked by a hacker and reminded why it's worth trying to tame that great beast, the Internet. (Screenshot: prashantrao.com)

The vicious gang rape in India’s capital in December of a 23-year old woman, who later died of her injuries, sparked revulsion and mass protests in a country where rampant sex attacks had, up to then, received scant notice from the justice system or the media. AFP New Delhi correspondent Rupam Jain Nair reflects on why this case has become a watershed, and how it has changed her approach to the issue and, perhaps, her job.(AFP PHOTO/ Andrew Caballero-Reynolds)

Real-time Twitter feed on Mali from AFP's the e-diplomacy hub, the Who's Who of digital diplomacy featuring the 4,500 most influential Twitter accounts in the realm of foreign policy and international relations (AFP Photo/Eric Feferberg)

Stephen Collinson’s forays for AFP during the 1990s into Burma – renamed “Myanmar” by a brutal military junta determined to quarantine their nation from outside influence – offered veiled glimpses into one of the most repressive police states in the world.  Twenty years later, Collinson returns as White House correspondent, trailing Barack Obama, to a country opening up at startling speed and moving, albeit fitfully, toward democracy. (AFP Photo/Jewel Samad)

"One of the most depressing daily tasks that we have is to track daily incidences of violence across Iraq," says AFP Baghdad bureau chief Prashant Rao. Uncooperative officials, biased information, attack sites cleaned up before forensic investigators can get a first-hand view all make the job of verifying reports "incredibly time-consuming and opaque," Rao says. Today, AFP renders public the spreadsheet it uses to tally Iraq's dead and wounded. (AFP Photo/M. Ibrahim)

Since 9/11, summits and high-level intergovernmental meetings everywhere -- notably in the US -- have become exercises in preventative security. That's kept the world's top officialdom safe, but has choked off the kind of informal and unscheduled contact between the media and leaders that is essential if journalists are to be more than glorified mouthpieces for political power, argues AFP's US State Department correspondent Jo Biddle. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP)

Sunday evening, May 6. France and the world are waiting to know whether incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy will keep his job or hand it over to Socialist challenger Francois Hollande, and tension in Agence France Presse’s central newsroom – less than two hours before the last poll closes – is running high. But not just because this is a big story. This year, AFP will do something it has never done before: send out the FLASH before the voting ends. (AFP Photo/Roland de Courson)  

“No, he’s not dead yet.”

When Remy Bellon, AFP’s veteran crime reporter, overheard those words, the blood in his veins ran cold.  Only minutes earlier he had pushed the “send” button on a global scoop – “Toulouse: suspect dead”.  It was the violent climax of a week-long drama that gripped first France, in the final throes of a presidential campaign, and then the world.

Here, a blow-by-blow account of how AFP mobilized its global, multimedia network to cover a breaking story, and a case study on how hard it is to do both – get there first, and get it right. (AFP Photo/Pascal Pavani)