This is part of a series looking at different examples of online-only news sites:
Part 1: MinnPost.com: can traditional print journalists strive online – and how?
Part 2: LePost.fr: when traditional media experiment with all-new approaches to journalism
Part 3: Rue89.com: pro-am success story shows path to newspapers


Rue89 offers a mix of professional and amateur news content (different from Jay Rosen's pro-am vision with New Assignment), with emphasis on pictures, video, and reader participation. Unlike Le Post, its content is organized editorially, with a homepage featuring the most important stories. The news site was designed following two principles: to be non-exhaustive, based on the fact that general news is available everywhere (for example, Rue89 rarely deals with obituaries, however famous the person), and to rid itself of traditional newspaper sections. Granted, content is still categorized, split between “World,” “Media,” “Culture,” and other tabs, but users can also navigate the site using tags.

Like LePost and MinnPost, Rue89 positions itself as a complement, rather than a direct competitor, to traditional media and newspapers. Rue89 also offers, to an extent, an English-language and Spanish-language version, ‘Street89’ and ‘Calle89’ respectively.

But how come Rue89 is succeeding, where most online-only news publications struggle?

The success of pro-am journalism: really professional journalists using readers as “watchtowers”

The project of Rue89.com is straightforward: “it’s the wedding of professional journalism with the participatory culture of the Internet,” says Haski.

The aim of Rue89 is to offer a 3rd way to envision news, away from the obsolete - and frankly irrational – ‘old’ media versus new media cleavage. Haski mentions the two typical extremist views, between print journalists who still firmly defend their “monopoly of expression,” and new media proponents who believe everybody should have their say in the digital age.

So Rue89 offers a middle path, pro-am journalism with constant editorial oversight.  “All content is certified with professional standards,” says Haski.

In fact, Rue89 is much closer to MinnPost than it is to LePost in its approach to online journalism. On one hand, Le Post seems to accept most contributions, based more on their potential for reader engagement than newsworthiness. On the other, MinnPost is open to the idea of user-generated content but has few plans so far to include more than comments. Rue89 stands in between. About 30% of overall content is produced collaboratively with readers (whether they give a lead, spark a conversation, include a comment, or actually submit a piece), but only about 15% of content is really written by readers.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons for its success. In about half a year, with 400,000 unique visitors per month, not a single cent spent in marketing campaigns, and with traditional media regularly citing Rue89, the news site has quickly been accepted as a legitimate player on the media scene. It seems that readers appreciate the idea of an “active and monitored participation,” says Haski.

Web 2.0 means reader interaction, not especially user-generated articles

Apart from quality content, it seems Rue89’s success has also been prompted by its proactive stance towards reader interaction. To start out, much of its staff was akin to blogging and Web 2.0 journalism.

Rue89’s fulltime editorial staff consists of the four founders from Libération, who were all bloggers there, five young, multimedia-apt journalists, and two intermediate journalists, who have previous experience in the written press – Haski mentions it makes the work atmosphere better to have journalists from all ages, rather than a dichotomist split between old print veterans and young online reporters.

What were the incentives for these print journalists to move to an online-only, risky venture? “Living an adventure,” suggests Haski, but also the opportunity to work for an entirely independent media.

The journalists’ tasks are three-fold:
- they perform the traditional investigation and researching tasks to write articles
- they verify the accuracy and validity of content submitted by the public
- they actively moderate and participate in the user conversation

The two latter points seem to be a primary factor behind Rue89’s success. According to Haski, most newspapers outsource the moderation of comments. So while newspaper websites may seem like they’re open to interaction by including comments, they’re often only providing a one-way tool for readers to respond. But for Rue89 journalists, responding to readers and leading the conversation is part of their job.

This is why Rue89’s stories often beget 50, 100, or even more comments. Readers are encouraged to return to a story multiple times, in order to view feedback to their comment.

 “When we don’t answer for more than an hour, they start getting impatient,” says Haski.

Another simple but effective feature, implemented by Rue89 but seldom included on newspaper websites: the ability to respond directly to a specific comment, instead of displaying comments in chronological order. This makes it possible to pursue a conversation sparked from a particular comment, or to respond to a particular reader.

Rue89: a product evolved from newspapers, to validate the pertinence of online journalism

The incredible success of Rue89 and its ability to uncover scoops (the latest being the unmasking of Alexis Debat, a French international news correspondent who fabricated numerous press interviews) has a lot to do with the founders’ ties with print journalism and the media.

To start out, its four founders obviously had a lot of experience in print journalism, with the contacts that come along with a few decades in the field. This also meant they had friends in the press, which, to Haski’s surprise, rapidly “recognized that we were legitimate journalists,” he says. As for The Politico or MinnPost, Rue89’s ties with print journalism have shaped the media’s perception of it: instead of being discarded as another breezy online news site, Rue89 is seen as an experiment carried out by ‘real’ journalists.

Not only that, Haski mentions the fact that print journalists do want to see a working model for online journalism, at a time when the printed press is trying to reinvent itself.  Colleagues told us we “must succeed to prove that journalism has a future on the Internet,” says Haski.

Lastly, perhaps most importantly, Rue89 was vetted by the media and by readers because it upheld quality standards. “The rules are the same,” says Haski. If they were different, it would be a mistake, he adds. He recognizes that the writing style of online journalism may be loosened up, but the ethics and professional standards must be upheld.

In fact, one of Rue89’s struggles is to validate online journalism as a quality product, to give it a “quality label,” says Haski. User-generated content is filtered accordingly. Rue89 is rather strict with the user submissions that it accepts, considering how few user articles it publishes overall.  “There are professional requirements we had in print and that we keep on the Web,” he says. Consequently, the editorial process at Rue89 resembles that of newspapers. Stories are checked and read by the editor-in-chief before publication.

Thus, with users spending 31 minutes on site on average, Rue89 leads all French news sites, ahead of newspapers. Haski attributes this to the site’s extensive use of embedded video. As well as comments, which, again, engage the reader regularly and draw his or her attention.

These are features that newspapers can easily improve upon. Their advantage, says Haski, is simply that they have additional resources to investigate and produce original content. But newspapers, compared to new media sites such as Rue89, have a “cultural disadvantage.” “They are prisoners of the dominant model,” says Haski. In every single paper, there still are pages that have no added value.

Many articles still simply reproduce a wire copy or a general news story that readers, by the time they read the print paper, already know about. “General news doesn’t justify the acquisition of a newspaper nowadays,” says Haski.

The project of Rue89 was initially conceived for Libération, but the journalists were met with the “conservatism in newsrooms towards the Internet,” says Haski. A problem that is also common outside of France, according to him. In a company where 90% of activities are still linked to traditional operations, all the managerial choices, including allocation of human resources, are still tied to the print product. There also remain difficulties in journalists’ own perception of online, which is often dismissed as a rogue platform.

“We’re lucky not to have to compromise with a big brother,” says Haski, alluding to the fact that at papers like Libération, web-first publishing is still not a given.

Perhaps most significant, asked whether he would return to Libération if the paper now embraced the project, Haski clearly says: “No.”


As a last note, Rue89.com is presented here as a success story, when in fact the site was launched less than half a year ago, and still has few online ads, which are the basis of its business model. But the buzz it has generated, and its current substantial traffic, should lead it to easily reach its goal of one million unique monthly visitors within 18 months of its launch.

Source: Pierre Haski, founder and director of Rue89.com