(Photo provided by: Baptiste Raffin)

Coming to you straight from Saint-Egrève, France, I am so excited to introduce you to Baptiste Raffin, the new Editor-In-Chief of The Messenger for the 2025-2026 school year. Raffin has been living in the United States since July of last year and is looking forward to continuing his education at Johnson County Community College. So, what brought Raffin to the United States?

“I’ve always been interested in this country and this culture, and so I’ve been here multiple times on vacation,” Raffin said. “I’ve always wanted to work in television, and to me, just the standard of television is the American one. So a year and a half ago now, I realized that if you want to do it, you’re gonna have to go learn from the place and know how to do it from there.” 

Raffin had visited America previously, for the first time in 2011 and has been back many times since. In 2011, he spent time in New York and Miami.

Before moving to America, Raffin graduated with his French Masters degree in 2021 in information communication. 

“A lot of people just stay local, just do a local university and live with your parents. 
But for the stuff I wanted to do, like TV, I wanted to be an actor, I would have to move,” Raffin said. “And my mom also didn’t really want me to do acting school because they’re not like state diplomas, they’re not recognized by the state, and she wanted something that would be more official, that would be recognized somewhere. But I’m sure that if I really wanted, we would have found something that I could have done. But I wasn’t ready to move out, so in my university, in Grenoble, there was a degree called information communication.”

After receiving his Masters degree in France, Raffin spent time working at the university.

“I wasn’t really looking for much work, but I found work at the university, in February,” Raffin said. “So I graduated in July 2021, and I started working in February 2022. For the PhD students, they have a doctoral college that gathers every PhD student. So they have an alumni network, like kind of social media stuff. So I was the manager for that. And the PhD students also have to take I think it’s 120 hours of workshops during their PhD. And so the career center is in charge of some of those workshops. I was in charge of managing the workshops, like making sure we have the instructors. When are they [scheduled], taking care of registrations and stuff like that.”

As he is preparing to take over The Messenger this fall, Raffin is looking forward to continuing the vision for The Messenger and creating a lasting legacy. 

“I’m really looking forward to first continuing building the Messenger and continuing the vision that Elizabeth had for The Messenger and also bringing some of my ideas,” Raffin said. “We talked about ideas that I had. And that made me pretty excited to make it bigger than what we were able to do in just one semester. And then I’m someone who wants to go into the TV field. So videos and maybe with reporters talking to the camera, that would be something that I’m looking forward to seeing how we can make happen.”

After JCCC, Raffin hopes to transfer somewhere, like the University of Kansas, to further his education.