At its headquarters EFE's news area has been structured into eight newsrooms: National, International, Audiovisual, Digital Contents, Economy, Sports, Environment/Science, and Archive and Documentation.

In addition to its basic tasks of connecting newsrooms and content quality control, in 2022 the central coordination unit added the monitoring of the production objectives of the information service provided to the Spanish State established by the SIEG (Services of General Economic Interest), the redesign of the daily agenda accessible to the public as well as the transformation of the night newsroom.

National

The National newsroom took on the production of text, photo and video packages, as well as the dissemination of content on the Twitter account @efenoticias_es.

Networking between EFE´s newsdesks in Spain continued to be promoted, as well as the support of the central editorial news desk in Madrid to the regional news services. This is a fresh system that brought a significant production of own topics that set the agenda of other media.

Management appointed a new chief of bureau in the southern region of Andalusia.

Major milestones for EFE were the impact of the invasion of Ukraine, the NATO summit in Madrid and the storming of the Melilla (spanish enclave) fence by Subsaharan african inmigrants.

Special reinforcements were deployed for the coverage of elections in the central region of Castilla y León in February, and Andalusia in June. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the socialist PSOE's electoral victory, the agency reporters nterviewed the former president Felipe González and exvicepresident Alfonso Guerra. Their statements had great media impact.

International

The return of war in Europe, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was the most important and demanding international coverage in 2022. It mobilized resources from headquarters and from EFE's main news desks abroad. Successive teams of reporters, photographers and cameramen, were also sent to the frontlines of war.

Another coverage that required a great deal of deployment and coordination was the NATO summit in Madrid. Before this event NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg gave an exclusive interview to EFE in Brussels. The agency dedicated a special issue of its newsletter Análisis to the event.

EFE appointed new chiefs of bureau in Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Domincan Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.

Newsdesks in America

In 2022, EFE continued its expansion process in the Americas and devised EFE Verifica (a fake news detection unit) to address the increase of disinformation in that continent.

In April, the agency signed strategic alliances with the Gabo Foundation -created in 1995 by the Colombian Literature Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and considered a major reference of Ibero-American journalism- and with the Universidad del Norte, based in the northern city of Barranquilla (Colombia).

This made possible the launching of the EFE School of Journalism in America, which has organized workshops and improved training courses, and the first scholarships for Colombian students.

To respond to the growth of the editorial desks and the expansion of the agency's journalistic and business structure, the headquarters of EFE America and EFE Colombia news desks added a third one.

EFE, the Gabo Foundation and the company Minsait organized a competition for developers and communicators to create an app, aimed at protecting those who report from risk areas in Colombia, thus contributing to press freedom and the safety of journalists in this country.

Asia-Pacific Desk

In October, the newly created Asia-Pacific Editorial Board, headquarted in Bangkok, began a more integrated work process among the different news desks and reporters in the area.

Despite thet takeover of Kabul by the Taliban in August 2021, EFE kept its presence in Afghanistan and continued to report from this country.

In April, EFE was the only news media outlet that located and interviewed in Malaysia San Chin Choon, the Malaysian businessman who was linked to an alleged scam in the sale of pandemic masks to the Madrid City Council.

Economy

The following were outstanding national and international news events covered by EFE: the transport workers strike in March in Spain; the economic impact of the war in Ukraine; the Davos Forum; the IATA assembly in Doha; the inauguration of the Spanish airline Iberia's Madrid-Washington flights; and the World Travel and Tourism Council in Riyadh.

Together with group KPMG, the Plan Europa Project. It consists of eight television programs, adapted into podcasts, reviewing the most relevant aspects of Spain´s Recovery Plan.

For the second consecutive year, and thanks to an alliance with red.es, EFE participated in the Spanish Pavilion at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. Three podcasts on the MWC were produced and distributed on the Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music and iVoox platforms, as well as on the Spain Pavilion website.

Environmental Information and Science

The COP 27 in Egypt stood out as one of their major coverages. Also, a daily newsletter was launched on the most important issues of the conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

EFE participated in a new European Union Life project, LifeKantauribai. The LIFE programme is the EU's funding instrument for the environment and climate action. Created in 1992, it has co-financed thousands of projects. This participation was the seventh european projects developed by EFE.

EFE organized with Civil Protection and EFE´s School of Journalism a seminar con communication during emergencies.

A collaborative protocol was reached with Foretica, organization dedicated to sustainability and social responsability in companies in Spain.

A news scholarship on Environment Journalism was created with the Association of Environmental Journalism and Oriva.

Sports

The Qatar Soccer World Cup was the top sports assignment and coverage for EFE in 2022.

Sports coverage in the United States increased following a fresh reorganization of correspondents around this country.

The EFE Sport Business newsletter was consolidated and round tables were held on topics such as sports industry, sports sponsorship, startups, anti-piracy designed by LaLiga (Spain´s soccer first division), among many other issues.

Analyses based on statistics were introduced and innovations were made in social networks, both on Twitter and LinkedIn, using multimedia content and highlighting the synergies with the audiovisual department.

EFE Awards to the best latinamerican soccer and basketball players, reinforced the connection with Latinamerica. Marcelinho Huertas, from Lenovo Tenerife, and Vinicius Jr., from Real Madrid, were awarded in 2022.

Audiovisual

Audiovisual integration was fully implemented (in 2021, the former Radio newsroom had already been transformed into Audio).

The 10 episodes of EFE´s new podcast "Tabú Mental" (The Mental Taboo) were produced and broadcast for Amazon Prime.

EFE photos hit national and international front pages. They included the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala (by Esteban Biba), that of the Dominican baby with which the planet reached 8 billion inhabitants (by Orlando Barría in the Financial Times) or the photo of the "dragon in flames" (by Sxenick), rated by Time magazine as one of the best of the year.

We joined the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), a global association of technology companies, social networks and media that guarantees the authenticity of audiovisual content through an encrypted security protocol. Promoted by Adobe, Twitter and The New York Times, the CAI has nearly 800 members worldwide, including major international news agencies and companies such as Microsoft, Nikon and Qualcomm.

Digital Content

The new Digital Content department promoted a strategy to reach the general public as a way of relaunching the EFE brand and its news products.

The new efe.com, launched in September, increased and improved editorial criteria based on quality journalism, together with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and new trends in digital journalism. In addition, the vertical video edited especially for networks was introduced in order to position EFE on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook and enter TikTok, where in less than a year it has gained 83,000 followers and almost 2 million "likes".

These new objectives transformed the work of the former "Digital Continuity Unit", thanks to an intense and complex process of training, skills acquisition and control of new tools that have been extended to the rest of the portals within this Directorate: EFE Verifica, EFE Salud and Efeminista.

The thematic portals, together with the new Digital Newsroom, have contributed to the creation of new digital products such as Google Showcase, a daily selection of EFE´s best free content or the "newsletter" created by EFE Verifica and sent over WhatsApp.

News files and Archives

EFEData distributed more than 700 chronologies/documents/biographies across the news spectrum.

Since September 2022, EFE´s photo archive has been accessible through the Integrated Editing Program (PMU). This has been a technical improvement that has made more than 12 million photos available to newsrooms, at a rate of 2,000-2,500 photos per day.

Several exhibitions used EFE´s archives such as the "50th anniversary of the Madrid Zoo"; "Equals in Sport" (at the Spanish Sports Council); "75 years of the Madrid Municipal Transport Company (EMT)" in Madrid's El Retiro park and "Central America, 50 years in 50 images" in Panama City (Panama).

In 2022, 93,000 video files entered Estructure, video editing system.

EFE´s news reports unit registered more than 1.000 downloads by the news agencies clients.