by Tatiana Repkova

Agence France-Presse and Italian news agency ANSA announced a cooperation deal for an economic and social news Internet portal for Mediterranean basin countries. AFP will join 18 other national agencies that have been supplying news to the ANSAmed portal since 2004.

AFP will contribute output from its southern French bureaus in Marseille, Nice and Montpellier, as well as from its bureaus in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania. AFP also committed to supplying ANSAmed with news items of European and Mediterranean importance from newsrooms around the Mediterranean.

ANSAmed publishes news in Italian, English and Arabic, will receive between 10 and 20 daily news items with a Mediterranean angle from AFP. AFP and ANSA already buy each other's editorial services and work together in several forums at a European and Mediterranean level. ANSAmed's 19 member agencies are AA (Turkey), ACN (Catalonia), AFP, AMI (Mauritania), ANA (Greece), ANSA (Italy), APS (Algeria), ATA (Albania), CAN (Cyprus), MAP (Morocco), Mena (Egypt), NNA (Lebanon), PETRA (Jordan), QNA (Qatar), SABA (Yemen), SANA (Syria), STA (Slovenia), TAP (Tunisia) and WAM (United Arab Emirates). AFP; April 23, 2007