A French website is using new ways to attract and interact with its followers, writes LARA MARLOWEin Paris
WHEN EDITORS at the French daily newspaper Libérationasked their foreign correspondents to start writing blogs, they had no idea they would spark a young-Turk style revolt that would launch one of the country's most innovative news websites.
“Blogging put us in touch with the potential of the internet,” recalls Pascal Riché, Libération’s former Washington correspondent, now the editor-in-chief of www.Rue89.com.
Riché and his colleagues in New York and Beijing attempted to persuade Libé's management to concentrate on the online edition, but this was resisted.
“We told ourselves we shouldn’t leave internet journalism to amateurs,” Riché continues. “We said: ‘Let’s get out of the besieged citadel that’s trying to fight the internet, and have a good time’.”
The journalists invested their departure indemnities in the website and asked the 30 richest people they knew to invest €10,000 each. They named their website ‘Rue’, meaning ‘street’ “because a street is an open place, of exchanges, cafes, demonstrations”, says Riché.
The figure 89 symbolised the 1789 French revolution, while 1989 was a year of huge change in the world: the birth of the internet, Tiananmen Square, the end of apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall . . .
Today, Rue89’s headquarters is a sunny former artist’s studio in Paris’s 20th district. It employs 20 journalists and claims hits from 180,000 computers each day. However, the financial crisis has smashed dreams of easy profits.
Last year, five investors provided a total of €1 million in fresh capital. “We’ll probably have to look for more money,” admits Riché. Advertising in French media has dropped an average of 30 per cent. Rue89 has an annual turnover of €500,000, but would need to double that to break even.
The financial struggle hasn’t prevented Rue89 from publishing scoops. It went online on May 6th, 2007, a few hours before Nicolas Sarkozy became president.
Three of its biggest exclusives involved Sarkozy. Rue89 learned that Sarkozy's second wife Cecilia hadn't voted. Le Journal de Dimanchehad the story, but didn't publish it. Rue89 was able to confirm that Arnaud Lagardère, (owner of the Journaland a close friend of Sarkozy), along with Sarkozy's chief of staff and his press adviser, all telephoned to order that the article be spiked – the first time France's new leader quashed a story.
Rue89 was the first French media outlet to post video images of Sarkozy acting as if he were drunk at a G8 summit in Germany, and a recording of Sarkozy being rude to technicians at France 3 television.
"We're the enfants terriblesof French media," boasts Riché. "Sarkozy's people control [media bosses] Arnault, Boléré, Bouygues, Dassault and Lagardère. We're just 20 journalists in one room in the 20th, but they can't control us."
It was also Riché who unmasked Alexis Debat, a charlatan who published fake interviews with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and others. The New York Timesand Washington Postfollowed up Rue89's story.
When founded in the wake of the May 1968 student riots, the left-wing newspaper Libérationwas 70 per cent owned by staff. In 2005, financier Edouard de Rothschild took a controlling interest. Libé's original slogan was "the newspaper by the people and for the people".
The founders of Rue89 felt French print media had lost that ethos. “Radio kept it,” says Riché. “We feel closest to radio, where listeners call in, because we are reactive and interactive. We use a lot of hypertext links and video.
“The problem with most websites is that they all give the same information; it’s just cut and paste.”
Rue89 holds its story conference on Thursdays at 9.30am. As staff discuss topics, a journalist logs the discussion on to the website. Between 10 and 30 readers follow the meetings and let it be known whether they’re tired of a story, or believe something should be followed up.
“With us, articles don’t really have a start or a finish,” says Riché. “The article is the process.”
Rue89 had the first coverage of riots in Guadeloupe earlier this year, because its readers posted live eyewitness accounts before French media reached the West Indian island.
When a Czech weekly published an article revealing that Sarkozy had criticised German chancellor Angela Merkel in a conversation with the Czech prime minister, Rue89 found a reader in Prague to translate the article verbatim.
Across the world, newspapers are in crisis, in part because the internet makes content available for free. Riché believes print newspapers will survive, although some will go bankrupt and others will follow the radical choice of the US Christian Science Monitorto publish only online.
“The relationship of print media with readers must change,” he says. “Newspapers have to get off their high horse, stop talking down to people. That’s over, because people no longer want that model.”
Newspaper readership began declining long before the advent of the internet, Riché says.
“No new media ever killed another. Television didn’t kill radio. When TV started, people were making filmed radio; a guy with a microphone in front of the camera, but then they learned to use several cameras, and images. That’s the kind of revolution we have to make on the internet.”
As Rue89’s experience has shown, websites are recouping only a fraction of the advertising revenue lost to newspapers. No one has found the philosopher’s stone that will ensure the financial security of journalism. Even as it courts advertisers, Rue89 is exploring other leads, such as training journalists to write for the web, co-productions with radio and television producers and designing websites for clients.