On May 6 last year, the day that Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of France, news website Rue89.com launched in France, writes Stephen Brook.
"One year on we are in better shape than he was," founder Pierre Haski told the World Editors Forum at WAN. The site came into its own just a week after launch, when it found out that a newspaper had suppressed a story that Sarkozy's wife Cecilia did not vote in the second round election because its owner was a friend of the president. "This was worth all the most expensive advertising campaign for our launch, our servers were blown up," Haski said.
With a team of about 15 journalists, the free, advertiser-supported website, born out of the sickly state of print journalism in France has about 650,000 unique users after a year.
Several months after launch, Rue89.com canceled its contract a wire service and stopped reprinting wire stories. "We never put one single wire story online, never. We are not running after hot news. We realised after three months no-one was looking at it. They are flooded by easily available news," Haski said.
The site does not use citizen journalism, rather a hybrid "pro-am" model - professionals and amateurs working together. The motto is "information with three voices, journalists, experts and readers, working together in the news-gathering process," Haski said. One third of the content comes from non-professional sources, in the form of alerts, testimony and commentaries, but professional journalists have the final say on what goes online.
The site has active blogs and opted for a free registration system to cut down on offensive comments - it stopped 90% of them. In an unusual innovation, for very active blogs editors select the best comments and put them up the top of the comments section to give readers the best selection. Journalists and authors moderate their own blogs.
