Rue89 was co-founded by Pierre Haski, Pascal Riché, Arnaud Aubron, Michel Lévy-Provençal, and Laurent Mauriac.

Libération, which had been bought back by Édouard de Rothschild, was then in the turmoil of a crisis, which included a plan of downsizing and the voluntary resignation of a number of its long-standing employees.

On 5 September 2007, Pascal Riché revealed that Alexis Debat, a collaborator of The National Interest and of ABC News, had signed a false interview of Barack Obama, published in Politique Internationale.

[2] In February 2008, Michel Lévy-Provençal, one of the founders, who left when the website was launched, sold his shares and criticized Rue89 for being a "marketing success" but a journalistic failure.

[8] As of March 2015, after refocusing on the so-called "digital revolution" in late 2014, Rue89 global audience is far behind other French online newspapers[9] such as the Huffington Post France.