Rue89, an online-only news site launched in May 2007 by a group of former journalists at Libération, has been one of the year's success stories in the French media landscape (over 650,000 unique visitors monthly, Nielsen).

Its founder, Pierre Haski, will discuss the site's path to success, as well as the new ethical standards that arise on the Web, at the upcoming World Editors Forum to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 1 to 4.

(See our previous interview with Haski, who details the pro-am news process of the Web 2.0 site.)

According to him, Rue89 was launched in response to two crises of the press in France: the economic - structural - downturn of the daily press and the increasing disconnect between traditional journalists and their readers. "The idea was that there is (still) on the Web an essential role for journalists," said Haski. Along with his colleagues, who all had blogs, "We realized that blogs - and the Internet - were a way to reconnect and reestablish this (lost) link with readers."

Since then, the website has regularly come up with scoops and gained a solid reputation among traditional media outlets.

Haski will also discuss the new ethical issues that have arisen with online news. "The Web mustn't be a lawless, right-less arena," said Haski. "The rule ands laws that usually apply must also be applied to the Web," he said, citing the right to privacy and defamation. In other words, the - print - journalistic principles he and his team adhere to must be upheld online.

The difficulty, of course, is adapting these standards to the new practices of the Web.

A recent legal suit in France illustrates very well the range of new media issues that have yet to be resolved. In the Fuzz affair, as it is known, a French actor launched a suit against a flurry of blogs and sites, including buzz-aggregating site Fuzz.fr, after it linked back to a gossip story that claimed the actor was back in a relationship.

Fuzz.fr was eventually shut down, after the court decided it had served as a relay point for the contentious information.

Should aggregators be liable for the links posted on their site, even if generated by the community? According to Haski, although he has no definite answer, "It doesn't seem tolerable to hide oneself behind a robot that crawls the Web."

These new practices also affect traditional media's habits in some cases: a blogger, hosted by the site of the weekly Nouvel Observateur, was literally copy-pasting whole articles from Rue89. Because nouvelobs.com's traffic is significant, the blogger's posts actually ranked higher than Rue89 on Google. The blog was eventually shuttered, but only after Rue89 signaled this to the Nouvel Observateur.

"These practices are very surprising because they come from companies that are themselves very careful about their intellectual property," said Haski.

Although the blog was swiftly shut down, Haski was surprised to see that some traditional media loosen their editorial practices for content on the Web.

"Our starting point, and ending point, is that there are professional and deontological rules that exist on other platforms, which should also exist on the Web," said Haski.

"We set a rule at the start that no content would be published online if it hadn't been previously checked by a professional journalist."


Haski will speak at the World Editors Forum, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, June 1-4. Other preview interviews available here.

Source: Pierre Haski, founder Rue89.com