Profile
Agerpres is known as the “national news agency of Romania”, the country’s state-owned and state-funded agency founded back in 1889. It had various names across time. It unfolded as Agentia Telegrafica a Romaniei (The Telegraph Agency of Romania). It operated as Rompres between 1990 and 2008, the year when it changed its name back to Agerpres. The agency had operated as Agerpres before, between 1949 and 1989.
Since the early 1990s, Agerpres had at least one strong private competitor, the Mediafax news agency, but in the past decade Mediafax’s offer shrank, a result of the overall downfall of the Romanian media market, which could afford fewer and fewer paid news services. Hence, as of the early 2020s, Agerpres remained the only large news agency in Romania, supported entirely from the state budget. The other outlets presenting themselves as “news agencies”, including News.ro or Mediafax.ro, are essentially average news portals fueled by revenues from advertising.
In the past, there were various allegations of political bias and propaganda at Agerpres (Rompres), mostly stemming from the agency’s affiliation with the government. In recent years, there have been fewer such allegations, possibly because the agency has no strong competitor to compare with, among other reasons.
A member of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), Agerpres publishes in Romanian, English and Hungarian. It also provides a photo service with a karge archive that it has created in time.