AFP Snaps Up MJ Grad

Recent MJ graduate, Clement Rossignol Lagandré, has been hired by Agence France Presse‘s Asia Pacific’s television desk as a TV producer.

Rossignol, who is French, interned at AFP this summer for two months. He did such a good job that they have kept him on.

The job consists of adapting English-language stories into French. This involves translating, linking them to written news stories from the wire, entering them into the system, recording the voice-over and doing the necessary re-editing on Final Cut Pro.

Clement Rossignol

He also brings the various stories AFP receives from video-journalists around the region to AFP’s high technical standards. To do this he needs to adapt scripts and produce the stories. Rossignol also works on his own stories, conducting interviews, filming, editing and solving technical problems linked to the recent upgrade to HD.

Rossignol got the internship through Doug Meigs, the internship coordinator at the JMSC.

“I’m particularly thankful to Doug for pushing my candidature on the grounds that I was extremely motivated and that I was a French speaker and could help in dealing with the French output,” he says. “It was extremely competitive because other universities also wanted to place interns at AFP.”

This was Rossignol’s second internship during his time at the JMSC.

“I first did a one-month internship for Hong kong-based documentary production company Asia Pacific Vision, for which I mostly did background research – facts, key issues, contacts, etc. –  in preparation for pitches to be presented to various clients, such as the National Geographic Channel and the Discovery Channel,” he says. “I also helped with transcriptions and assisted on locations during shootings.”

He says that his Master’s year at the JMSC made him “more demanding with myself: more methodical and disciplined; more inquisitive; more rational in my chain of thoughts; more demanding when it comes to the quality of my journalistic output.”

Rossignol’s advice to other students: “Never stop asking questions, look for things to improve in your own work, work nights and weekends during your internship if necessary, and show that you’re made for a job that is more than just a job – rather, it’s an anthropological responsibility toward society, as Miklós Sukosd explained, as well as a way of life, as Patrick Smith once described.”