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Eugène Roe, right, promoted use of te reo Maohi - and women journalists - decades before either became fashionable in Pacific Islands media.

NEWS

Eugene Roe, deputy editor at RFO Polynesia, died Friday night at hospital Mamao, Papeete.

Aged 58 years, Eugene Roe was a journalist with RFO Polynesia, local outpost of a global state broadcaster, for the last twenty-five years.

After studying theology and journalism at Strasbourg, he began his career at 'Vea Porotetani', the journal of the Evangelical Church and the newspaper 'Les Nouvelles de Tahiti.'

In 1984, he joined RFO. A lover of te reo Maohi, Roe worked hard to include use of the language in professional journalism, and among arriving generations of journalists to RFO Polynesia. He believed in the ability of Polynesian youth to carry the profession, loud and clear, to an audience scattered across a territory bigger than Europe. Roe, also, was a faithful promoter to the arrival of women announcers and journalists across RFO antennae, reports Tahiti Presse, the official territorial news agency.

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