Fabrice Fries

Fabrice Fries (business executive)
Born	10 mars 1960
Nationality	French
Alma mater	Lycée Henri-IV, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Sciences-po, École normale supérieure, École nationale d'administration, Berkeley, Harvard
Agence France-Presse/CEO In office 2018 - Present CEO of very influential news agency

Fabrice Fries is CEO of Agence France-Presse (AFP), one of the three news agencies providing the vast majority of news (especially international) in corporate media (the other two are Reuters and Associated Press). His career shows the seamless moves between the bureaucracy, big corporations such as PR-companies, and corporate news.

Career

Fries had an elite education, from the most prestigious lyceés and universities in France. After leaving ENA, Fabrice Fries joined the Court of Auditors, before joining the cabinet of the President of the European Commission, as part of Jacques Delors' dream team ('the Messier boys'), in 1990.

In 1995, he joined the multinational Compagnie Générale des Eaux (Vivendi), as project manager for the Chairman and CEO, Jean-Marie Messier.

Appointed director of strategy and development of the multinational advertising and public relations company Havas in 1997, he led the refocusing of the company's activities on publishing and the press and actively participated in the merger with Compagnie Générale des Eaux which took control of the media company in 1998.

Havas was renamed Vivendi Universal Publishing and Fabrice Fries became its deputy managing director, in charge of press and professional magazines divisions, with brands such as L'Express, as well as many health information brands around the world.

In 2001, Vivendi decided to focus on consumer publishing and separated from its specialized press branch headed by Fabrice Fries. As part of this separation, he was appointed chairman and chief executive officer of Medimedia and Aprovia, two companies resulting from the sale of Vivendi's professional press activities (Le Moniteur, Usine nouvelle, LSA, Le Quotidien du Médecin, etc.) to hedge funds.

In 2004, Fabrice joined the IT and consultation multinational Atos Origin as Senior Vice President, responsible for key accounts and market strategy.

In September 2006, he was appointed Secretary General - and member of the Executive Committee - of Publicis, the third largest PR-company in the world, before taking over as head of Publicis Consultants, an agency specializing in corporate communication (i.e propaganda), crisis communication and press relations in June 2009.

Agence France-Presse

On April 12, 2018, he became president and chief executive officer of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency after obtaining a qualified majority by a vote of its board of directors (13 votes out of 18) in a third ballot.

Four days later, on April 16, thee members of the board of directors that appointed him wrote to Minister Françoise Nyssen:

 "We have decided to send you this letter to let you know how amazed we are. which this process took place, contrary to all the good governance practices that would be suitable for such an enterprise ”...this Pyrrhic victory, that happened on order...is not the right solution to establish real future legitimacy vis-à-vis all of the agency's stakeholders." The board members protested that the election jeopardize the "real independence of the agency vis-à-vis the State" and raises questions of "conflicts of interest".

Fake news

In an interview, Fries stated "The three big agencies [...] do not play the same role of 'gatekeeper”' that we did 20 years ago." "News agencies can no longer only report facts: they must now debunk fake news and this is a new mission for AFP."

In another interview he said “the nature of our clientele is also changing. We had one client category – the press, which is suffering. Today the clients are big tech,”. Facebook, for example, is one of his clients. “Our journalists do the fact check. Once that is complete, we see a message beside the news that the story has been fact-checked by AFP. If the story is different, we see a message saying AFP has a different version of the story. If the story is fake, we notify that the story is fake and if someone likes or shares a fake story, it reminds the person who is liking or forwarding the story that they are doing so with a fake story.”

Private life

Fabrice Fries is the brother of Charles Fries, a French diplomat. He is married to Fabrizia Benini, a civil servant at the European Commission, father of two children, and lives with his family in Belgium.

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