Agerpres

The National News Agency AGERPRES (Agenția Națională de Presă AGERPRES) is Romania’s public news agency. It traces its origins to the Telegraph Agency of Romania, founded on 27 March 1889, and has been known as Agerpres since 1949, apart from the period from 1990 to 2008, when it was called ROMPRES. It provides text news in Romanian, English and Hungarian, press photography, video, and documentation and media monitoring services.

Media assets

News agency: Agerpres, with a website and a paid news feed; text news in Romanian, English and Hungarian, the Hungarian-language feed being offered free of charge; press photography, video, and documentation and media monitoring. Its photo archive covers 1927 to the present, and since 2006 it has been the exclusive distributor of the EPA and Xinhua photo feeds.

Correspondents: its own correspondents cover 30 of Romania’s counties, 11 counties remain uncovered, and it has no permanent correspondents abroad.

International: Agerpres is a member of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), on whose board its director general has sat since September 2023, and of the Association of the Balkan News Agencies (ABNA-SE), and since 2006 has been a founding member of the Black Sea news agencies association.

Ownership and governance

Law 19 of 2003, which regulates the organisation and functioning of the agency, defines it as an autonomous public institution of national interest, with legal personality, editorially independent and under the control of Parliament. It is led by a management council (consiliul director), made up of the director general, the deputy directors general and the heads of the financial and technical directorates, and chaired by the director general, who has the rank of secretary of state and appoints the other members by order after a competition. The director general is proposed by the Prime Minister and appointed for five years by a vote of Parliament in a joint sitting of the two chambers, with the opinion of the specialist committees. If no successor has been appointed when the term ends, the director general’s mandate is extended by law, and it ends in the event of inability to exercise it for more than six months, resignation, a final criminal conviction or incompatibility. The director general, the members of the management council and specialist staff may not belong to political parties.

Parliament’s culture committees examine the agency’s annual report, which the joint plenary of the two chambers debates and votes on, but, unlike at the public broadcasters, the fate of the agency’s management does not depend on that vote. In 2017 PSD senators proposed that the rejection of the annual report should entail the dismissal of the director general; in 2024 the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) and the International Press Institute (IPI) noted that these efforts to amend the law, which would have undermined the management’s autonomy, were ultimately unsuccessful, and that the agency functions without a council of administration that could ensure public oversight.

Claudia-Victoria Nicolae, a journalist who had been the agency’s deputy director general and, from July 2018, an adviser to the Interior Minister, Carmen Dan, was appointed director general on the Government’s proposal on 14 November 2018 by 220 votes to 111, for a five-year mandate. Her initial term ended in November 2023, and she has continued as director general under the statutory extension, holding the post in September 2026; the MediaSind union describes the agency’s leadership as having been in office for almost eight years, three of them in what it calls an interim situation.

Source of funding and budget

Under Law 19 of 2003 the agency’s expenses are financed from the state budget, and it also earns its own revenues from the sale of its services. In 2024 the MJRC and IPI noted that it has a distinct competitive edge in resources over its main private competitor, News.ro.

According to the agency’s 2026 budget annex, its estimated spending in 2025 was RON 30.75 million, of which RON 27.9 million was financed from the state budget and RON 2.8 million from own revenues, while its own revenue receipts amounted to RON 3.8 million. Its 2026 budget of RON 31.2 million, 1.54 per cent more than the estimated 2025 spending, comprises RON 27.9 million from the state budget and RON 3.35 million from own revenues, with personnel spending of RON 25 million; Parliament’s budget committees approved it in March 2026, and Nicolae stressed during the committee debate that infrastructure, technology and digitalisation are covered from own revenues. The annex sets a target of keeping own revenues at 10 per cent or more of the total budget and reports a severe staff shortage caused by mass retirements and by legal limits on public-sector hiring. In September 2026 Agerpres obtained RON 7.5 million, mostly from the European Regional Development Fund, for a three-year project, running from September 2026 to September 2029, to digitise its historical archive.

In June 2023 the Federation of Culture and Mass-Media FAIR-MediaSind warned that Agerpres journalists risked pay cuts of up to 50 per cent following interpretations by Court of Accounts inspectors, and on 15 October 2024 its staff held the first strike in the agency’s history, a two-hour warning strike over chronic underfunding by the Government.

Editorial independence

Law 19 of 2003 guarantees the agency’s autonomy and editorial independence and requires it to present the realities of social and political life objectively and even-handedly, and information to be presented and transmitted faithfully, without any influence from public authorities. The management council sets the principles of professional ethics and monitors compliance with them, and the law provides for no independent body to monitor the agency’s editorial independence, its oversight being parliamentary. An internal ombudsman service, subordinate to the director general, analyses complaints, petitions and requests for the right of reply concerning the agency’s activity and handles requests for access to public information. In 2024 the MJRC and IPI recommended that the law provide for a council of administration to ensure public oversight.

In earlier State Media Monitor research, journalists and media experts interviewed in March 2023, May 2024 and June 2025 said that, in practice, Agerpres operates much like a state information department, with editorial decisions deeply influenced, if not directed, by state authorities and the director general. On 12 October 2026 an extraordinary general assembly of the MediaSind branch at Agerpres unanimously rejected changes to the internal rules proposed by the management. According to the union, the changes would replace the five-member disciplinary commission provided for in the collective labour agreement, which includes two union representatives, with a three-member commission, two of whose members would be appointed by the employer, turning disciplinary investigations into an instrument under the management’s control, and would make electronic access cards a means of permanent surveillance of staff.

AI and digital policy

No standalone published editorial policy on artificial intelligence (AI) was identified for this update. In November 2024 Agerpres launched a pilot application, developed with the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI Bucharest), that summarises Agerpres news and converts the summaries into speech read by AI-generated voices. The agency’s 2026 budget annex plans AI-assisted news feeds, partial automation of the processing of press releases, AI recognition of faces, objects and places in photographs in its documentation archive and automatic translation of photo metadata. The Government approved a national AI strategy for 2024 to 2027 in July 2024.

Classification rationale

Agerpres retains the State-Controlled (SC) classification in 2026. Its director general is proposed by the Prime Minister and appointed by a vote of Parliament, the current director general has continued in office under the statutory extension since her initial term ended in November 2023, the state budget finances about nine-tenths of its spending, and no independent body monitors its editorial independence. The finding that its editorial decisions are influenced by state authorities and the director general rests on State Media Monitor’s interviews from 2023 to 2025, as no more recent documented case of state direction of its news coverage was identified, and the October 2026 union dispute concerns management practices rather than editorial content; the classification warrants continued review.

October 2026