Meetings between frames: Negotiating worth between journalism and management

European Management Journal xxx (2017) 1e8

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Meetings between frames: Negotiating worth between journalism and management Elena Raviola Management and Organization, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Vasagatan 1, 40530, Gothenburg, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 3 February 2017 Received in revised form 8 May 2017 Accepted 20 June 2017 Available online xxx

This paper explores meetings between different frames, thus producing different overflows in an
venot's (2006) sociology of critique (also called the organizational context. Relying on Boltanski and The sociology of conventions) to analyze the relationship between different frames, this paper specifically investigates the encounter between journalism and management in practice in a digital news venture. It is based on an ethnographic study of Rue89, a French news organization, which was started in 2007 by former newspaper journalists and publishes an advertising-based generalist news website open for readers' participation in the production of news. The study shows how negotiations between different frames organizing work at Rue89 take place in different ways in different situations and lead to different results, in terms of what is worth doing and what is not, thus overflowing. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Framing Overflowing Journalism Management Digital technologies

1. Introduction News organizations are pluralistic organizations. They are organizations in which multiple competing logics coexist (e.g., Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2007; Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen, Van de, & Andrew, 2009; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). The attention of scholars has, in fact, focused on the opposition between the logic of journalism, where legitimatization is gained through peer recognition, and the logic of market/business/management, where numbers measure legitimacy (e.g., Tunstall 1971; Tuchman, 1978; €ck, 2005; Raviola, 2012). The Bourdieu, 1996; Fagerling & Norba widespread digital technologies have been found considerably changing the relationship between journalism and management €ck, 2013). This relationship is (Boczkowski, 2005; Raviola & Norba particularly interesting to study now when an increasing number of newspaper organizations are economically in crisis, and digital technologies have been opening new possibilities for pursuing journalism in innovative ways. In this paper, I investigate how journalism and management relate to each other as two frames for organizing newswork in a digital news venture. With established news organizations facing financial difficulties and restructuring their operations over the last decade, an increasing number of journalists have left more or less

E-mail address: [email protected].

voluntarily traditional media companies and started their own ventures. Many of these ventures are attempts to offer readers/ users new information services and change the news field. This phenomenon is also called “entrepreneurial journalism,” referring to the merge of journalism and entrepreneurship and represents a new setting to investigate the relationship between journalism and management. How does the relationship between professional and management logics unfold in practice in organizations where there are not two distinct groups representing different logics? What happens to those frames traditionally understood and lived as competing when non-management professionals become entrepreneurs? Here, I treat journalism and management, which act as different frames, as two different ways of understanding worth in news production, thus producing different kinds of overflows (Callon, €fgren, 2012, 2013). More specifically and 1998; Czarniawska & Lo simply, journalism relies on the principle of the “Truth” to frame what is worth doing, while management relies on the principle of
venot, 2006). “Efficiency” to establish worthiness (Boltanski & The The setting of entrepreneurial journalism can be considered a case of controversial situations or, as Callon (1998) put it, “hot” situations where no agreement on frames and consequent overflows is easily reached. It is in investigating such hot situations that I find
venot’s (2006) framework to fruitful to bring in Boltanski and The explore controversies around frames and overflows as disagreements on worth and non-worth.

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venot’s (2006) sociology of critique Relying on Boltanski and The (also called the sociology of conventions) to analyze the relationship between different frames, this paper aims at investigating the encounter of journalism and management in practice in a digital news venture. It is based on an ethnographic study of Rue89, a French news organization, which was started in 2007 by former newspaper journalists and publishes an advertising-based generalist news website open for readers' participation in the production of news. The study shows how negotiations between different frames organizing work at Rue89 take place in different ways in different situations and lead to different results, in terms of what is worth doing and what is not, thus overflowing. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. First, a conceptual framework is introduced to study frames as different orders of worth encountering each other. It builds primarily on
venot’s (2006) economies of conventions. The Boltanski and The methods of the study are then presented, followed by a description of the story of Rue89. Next, different encounters between journalism and management at Rue89 are analyzed. A concluding discussion ends the paper. 2. Professions and management in pluralistic organizations: sociology of critique The concepts used to depict plurality in pluralistic organizations have flourished over the last years: to mention a few, institutional pluralism (Kraatz & Block, 2008), institutional logics (e.g., Thornton et al., 2012), competing rationalities (Cloutier & Langely, 2007), and pluralistic contexts (Denis et al., 2007). The relationship between different logics, rationalities, and contexts is often portrayed as a tension between, for instance, profession and management: on the one side, the ambition of autonomy and public service, and on the other side, the struggle for control and commercial success (e.g., Engel & Hall, 1973; Sarfatti Larsson, 1977). The ample sociological literature on professions and professionalization (e.g., Sarfatti Larsson, 1977; Freidson, 1986; Abbott, 1988; Scott, 2008) describes how identities and ideologies define fields of expertise, provide their members with ethical norms, and prescribe what to do under various conditions. The relationship between professions and management is furthermore complicated by the professionalization of management (e.g., Reed & Anthony, 1992) and the transformation of professions in the audit society (Power, 1999).
venot (2006) offered an original approach to Boltanski and The the study of pluralistic organizations, making for a sociological analysis of critique rather than a critical sociology (Jagd, 2013). Rather than being the site of passively and unconsciously endured domination of a class or of a logic over another, Boltanski and
venot’s (2006) social world is “a space shot through by a mulThe tiplicity of disputes, critiques, disagreements and attempts to reestablish locally agreements that are always fragile” (Boltanski, 2011, p. 27). On the basis of previous studies, they identified six worlds with their corresponding orders of worth based on different modes of evaluating the higher common good (Boltanski &
venot, 1999). In the inspired world, worth is evaluated on the The principle of creativeness; in the domestic worlddtypically dominant in the familydreputation and friendship/family are the principles of worth; the civic world justice is constructed in relation to the collective interest; the fame world is based on opinion and recognition; the market world bases worth on price, and finally, the
venot, industrial world is the world of efficiency (Boltanski & The 1999; 2006). These different worlds have been investigated in organization studies in different contexts and with different focuses. The most recurrent focus has been the identification of the six worlds in justification practices emerging in controversies of different kinds and the exploration of the relationships, often

conflictual, between these worlds (e.g., Daigle & Rouleau, 2010; Fronda & Moriceau, 2008; Mesny & Mailhot, 2007; Patriotta, Gond, & Schultz, 2011). A similar focus has been maintained in
venot (2000), comparing the sociological work of Lamont and The France and the USA in a variety of contexts based on informants' appeal to different orders of worth. Fewer works have explored the way in which tests and compromises between worlds are performed and shape the relationship between worlds, like in the work of Dansou and Langely (2012) on the role of tests in institutional work or the work of Daigle and Rouleau (2010) on the three-level structure of compromises in strategic plans of arts organizations or the work of Stark (2009) on the sense of dissonance in organizations governed according to multiple principles of worth, which he calls heterarchies. This framework may look similar to institutional logics or rationalities such as those presented by Friedland and Alford (1991) and Thornton et al. (2012), and several attempts have been made to reflect on the relationship between the two perspectives (see, for instance, the special issue on French pragmatism and organizational institutionalism, edited by Brandl et al., in 2013 in Journal of Management Inquiry). Many of these attempts have, however, considered the point of departure in institutional theory, in the search for useful contributions to the development of what can be considered the dominant perspective in organization studies, and have thus overlooked two original aspects of Boltanski and
venot’s (2006) sociology of critique, which are especially releThe vant for this study. The first one is the focus on the processes and practices of critique and justification for the formation of organizational order
venot and change (Jagd, 2011). According to Boltanski and The (2006), people agree by justifying the worth of their actions and decisions with reference to a higher common good. Different common goods define different orders of worth or worlds. These worlds are, however, not a priori defined, as logics in institutional theory. As Wilkinson (1997: 318, in Dequech, 2005, p. 469) argued, in the economies of conventions framework, “rules are not prior to action nor are they elaborated from outside the action but emerge within the process of actor-coordination.” In this process, thus, conventions, which are working on the basis of a tacit or implicit agreement among individuals to take part in them (e.g., Dupuy
an, 2004: 43; Salais, 1989: et al., 1989; Favereau, 1989: 296; Orle 213; Reynaud, 1993), function both “as the result of individual actions and as a framework constraining the actors (Dupuy et al., 1989, 143; also Favereau, Biencourt, & Eymard Duvernay, 2001: 238)” (Dequech, 2005, p. 469). The sociology of conventions, with its focus on processes and practices of critique and justification, might be seen as a sociology  chaud” (hot actionsdactions in the making), of the “actions a meaning that it analyzes the disputes when they happen and in practice and thus the emergence of regimes of worth and justice (Bessy & Favereau, 2003, p. 134). In the practice of coordination and agreement around a convention, in fact, disagreements represent occasions in which worth is tested; different orders of worth are questioned during tests, where “individual and collective actors' engagement with their context is the object of judgement in terms of correspondence with legitimate organizing principles” (Dansou & Langely, 2012, p. 6). Tests can be of two kinds: they might question the way in which a higher common good has been instantiated (test of state of worth) or they might question the very higher principle governing the situation at hand (test of order of worth). Tests can be temporarily resolved in compromises, where “people agree to come to terms, that is, to suspend a clashda dispute involving more than one worlddwithout settling it through recourse to a test in just one of the worlds. The situation
venot, remains composite, but a clash is averted” (Boltanski & The

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venot's conceptualization of organi2006: 277). Referring to The zations as “compromising machines,” Jagd (2013) pointed out that the notion of compromising work is perhaps the major contribution of sociology of conventions to the study of organizations.  chaud” and on the disputes emerging The focus on the “actions a from disagreements makes this sociology of conventions close to Callon’s (1998) discussion on controversies around frames and the consequent overflows. Callon (1998) distinguished between “hot” and “cold” situations, depending on the degree of controversies. While in “cold” situations, agreements on frames and overflows are easily achieved, “hot” situations are characterized by controversies on everything, including “the identification of intermediaries and overflows, the distribution of source and target agents, the way effects are measured (…) [t]he actual list of actors, as well as their identities” (Callon, 1998, p. 260). The controversies around framing overflows in “hot” situations have been studied in a number of different settings, such as in relation to the role of accounting in shaping corporate strategy (Skaerbaek & Tryggestad, 2010), or the role of science museums and exhibitions transforming themselves from presentations of cold science to engagement with hot research debates (Meyer, 2009), or yet new possibilities of organizing heated decision-making processes around waste management in Sweden and Belgium (Sundqvist, 2014). The second overlooked aspect is the material realm of worth. As Jagd (2011) articulated, the worlds are not abstract entities, but they are polities made concrete in and with objects and subjects. Tests and compromises are not just discursive moves, but they “also implicate the material world, as the arrangements involved in the situation”dboth objects and subjectsd“are drawn upon as proofs,
venot, 2000; to support critiques or justifications (Boltanski and The
venot, 2009)” (Dansou & Langely, 2012, p. 8). Objects are The important both in agreement and disagreement processes, both in tests and compromises: they substantiate worth, but they call for valorization and need to be endowed with value. When valorized, they can be used as proofs in tests, but they can also be questioned
venot (2006) and become the object of tests. Boltanski and The introduced also the notion of compromise object that is a composite object that is in between worlds and thus whose worth is qualified according to different principles. This kind of objects tends to stabilize a compromise, but they can also “crash” and thus question the very compromise they were built around. Stressing precisely the two above-mentioned ideas of Boltanski
venot’s (2006) sociology of critique, namely the focus on and The  chaud” and on the material realm of worth, in this the “actions a paper, I investigate the negotiations between frames as ways of defining what is worth and what is not worth doingdthus considered overflowing. As Skaerbaek and Tryggestad (2010:110) pointed out, framing is a notion borrowed by Callon from Goffman, and it refers to “the material arrangements and investments [that] create a taken for granted boundary within which actors' interactions occur,” like on the stage of a theater. It is over different boundaries that negotiations take place in case of disagreement, involving the qualification and disqualification of people and things according to different principles of worth. Drawing different boundaries implies establishing different sets of “assumptions, conventions, mechanisms, and settings” (Skaerbaek & Tryggestad, 2010), which does or does not endow worth to different entities. These negotiations occur in variety of “hot” situations, which unfold in different forms, times, and places. It is this unfolding that I explore in this paper. 3. Methods This paper is based on an organizational ethnography conducted at Rue89 between 2010 and 2012. I generated material through

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interviews, observations, and collection of products (website pages and magazine issues) and some documents. I followed the organization during that period of time, as they had planned to launch a “new website” (a new version of their website) in April 2011, and I believed this could trigger reasoning around the relationship between management and journalism. I generated 140 recorded interviews to organizational members, bloggers, and readers; field notes from regular news meetings, casual conversations, everyday work practices, and other extraordinary events; samples of website pages; magazine issues; La Rue  eux, a documentary on Rue89; some video recordings of news est a meetings in 2008 and 2009, realized in preparation to the documentary. All the material is in French, and all interviews and field notes have been transcribed. For the purpose of this paper, I focus on interviews and field notes. I gathered data on interviews and field notes within 1 year between the Spring 2011 and the Spring 2012, when most of the field material was generated. I first carefully read and coded this  la Charmaz material in three steps, inspired by grounded theory a (Charmaz, 2006), by using NVivo. First, I proceed with grounded first-order coding, then I construct broader categories out of the very many first-order codes, and finally I interpret these broader categories into theoretical concepts inspired by Boltanski and
venot's notions, such as state-of-worth and order-of-worth The tests, worlds, objects, subjects, and compromises. 4. Rue89: a journalistic enterprise Rue89 is a French generalist news website, which specially focuses on politics and society. It was founded in Paris in the Spring 2007 by four journalists from the newspaper Lib
eration. From their blogging experience as foreign correspondents for Lib
eration, they had gained the conviction that the Internet could and need to be used to revolutionize journalism and the field of news. Their main idea was to create a website that could be a tool for dialogue with the non-journalistsd“readers and experts”dto include them in the news-production cycle. As journalists, they wanted, however, to maintain the “keys” of the production as guardians of quality and truth. So, they left Lib
eration and launched www.rue89.com, a free participatory news website designed in three columns: one for journalistic news, one for the dialogue with the readers, and one for advertising. The products and services offered by Rue89 grew significantly since its foundation. Apart from several developments of the website in 2011 and in 2013, between 2010 and 2011, Rue89 published also a print monthly magazine, closed down for economic reasons, and launched applications for mobile and tablet. In the attempt of diversifying the sources of revenues, Rue89 engaged in a number of other activities: advertising (approximately 65e70% of the revenues in 2011e2012), training programs, consulting services and web agency services (altogether approximately 30e33% of the revenues), and merchandising (accounting for a very small percentage). In addition, the organization steadily grew. In 2007, a small team of full-time volunteers, including the founders and several very young journalists, worked for the website and few consultancy services. By the beginning of 2009, there were approximately 20 people. At the time of the study in 2011e2012, Rue89 consisted of about 25 employees, among which 19 were journalists. Over the one and a half year preceding my study, a high number of people, including the youngest founder and several of the initially volunteering journalists, had left the organization. According to the remaining employees, this marked a sign of a significant change in the organization, a “skin mutation,” as the editor in chief defined it. Although freedom and autonomy were recognized by journalists as

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key features of Rue89, some organizational routines had been introduced, not without conflicts, over the years. Newswork was structured in weekly cycles around a weekly news conference held on Thursday morning between 9:00 and 10.30. All the other days begin with a 5-minute short meeting at 9:30. Personnel shifts have also been introduced to cover news over the weekend. Rue89 started with the initial capital of the founders of 100.000 V. After 5 months, in autumn 2007, they had to make their first capital increase. Therefore, they created a company called “Friends of Rue89,” through which they raised 300.000V from approximately 30 small friendly investors. This capital increase was certainly not the last one. As Rue89 struggled to reach break-even, between 2008 and 2011, it increased its capital with new and old shareholders about once every year to cover the losses and invest in new projects for growth. In December 2011, the company was acquired by a bigger French media group, which publishes the established political magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and still owns Rue89. 5. Three forms of negotiations between journalism and management Journalism and management framed differently what was worth doing at Rue89, and as a consequence, they managed and created different kinds of overflows. In simple terms, what for journalism was necessary time to write was for management too much and what for management was too costly was for journalism just enough money to pay all journalistic works. These two frames, however, were active in different ways at Rue89. Although these frames were at work always in the organizational life of Rue89 and were enacted by the same people, they could be more or less appropriate to use in different situations and their time, place, and form of working could be different. In the following three sections, I analyze three situations in which the encounter between the two frames took place and gave raise to controversies in different ways: everyday work, a strategy meeting, and an article on the website. 5.1. Everyday work Everyday work at Rue89 was structured around a short daily morning news meeting at 9:30 and a weekly longer news conference held on Thursdays between 9:00 and 10:30. The short daily morning meeting was aimed at all journalists briefly presenting what they are working on during the day and at the editors to plan their work for the day. After this meeting, also called standing conference, as all the participants were standing, the journalists went to their desks and started working on the articles they had been assigned to. The morning was then shaped by the so-called “Morning battle”: the attempt to publish 5 new articles on the website between 13:30, when a daily automatic newsletter was sent to the website members. While there was no other common meeting point during the day, lunch was usually a moment of conviviality and many of the journalists took lunch break together, leaving only few people to watch the newsroom. The end of the working day was at around 19:00 or 20:00. During everyday work, each journalist was solicited by the editor to choose topics they found interesting to cover and to find an “angle” for approaching those topics. As it was written in the vademecum for Rue89 journalists, “the angle is on Rue89 the most holy thing after the champagne Marcoult and the disco ball” and was the positive answer to three questions: Does the article have one and only one idea? Is it possible to summarize the article in one short sentence? If I read this sentence to my neighbor, will he/she open his/her eyes wide? The insistence on finding an angle was also related to the fact that Rue89 did not subscribe to press agency

services and thus had access to their news only through other media republishing press agencies’ dispatches. As the founders argued, this allowed Rue89 to save money, while at the same time forcing its journalists to find their own original angles to news and provide uniqueness to the website. In practice, in the search of subjects to write about, the journalists were often asked by the editor what they wanted to do: In French, they often used the word “envie” to refer to the singe journalist's desire to do something. Once an article was written in the content management system of the website, it was sent to the editor in chief or his deputy, who read it and gave detailed feedback, sometimes sitting beside the author and sometimes sending it back for rewriting. Finally, the article was approved and sent to the desk editors, who reread it one more time; web-edited it with links, pictures, and videos; and published it. Journalists at Rue89 talked often about the freedom and the degree of responsibility they have. From my observations of everyday work, it seems that the management frame surfaced very rarely. When it did, it did not seem to open a controversy with journalism, but rather the two frames seemed to support each other, like in the case of the lack of subscription to press agency services mentioned above. Most of news organizations do have a contract with national and international press agencies and receive their dispatches everyday all day long. For much of journalistic work, these dispatches constitute the basis of everyday news production. Rue89, however, did not have such a contract, which made the journalists’ work in this organization different from that in other newsrooms. Rather than originating a controversy, this was framed as a way of both saving money and making better journalism. The two frames were in agreement and supported each other in considering the subscription to press agency services overflowing. On rare occasions, though, the surfacing of the management frame in organizing everyday work in the newsroom could give raise to controversies and heat up the situation. One of these rare occasions is worth to be mentioned here. It was the introduction of the standing conference in the daily routines of the newsroom. The growth of the organization from approximately 10 volunteers to 20 employees in its first 2 years of life justified the need for some new daily routines to organize work. One of these routines was a 15-minute morning news meeting to be held every day at 9:30, except for Thursday, when the longer sitting conference was held. The introduction of the morning meeting in the Fall 2008 raised a lot of critique from some of the younger journalists. They interpreted the meeting as a hinder to their freedom and an intrusion in their liberty to decide what to do and when to do it. One of the journalists recruited earlier the same year said, It was [introduced] because everyone did like everyone liked … E: With regards to the employment of time? Yes. Coming at 9.30 or at 11 in the morning if you are not an early bird, like me … Personally I was against, because I like to sleep. At least, it is true, we know that the day, it begins, there is a clear thing, and then we are very free of organizing our own time. I have long subjects, investigations which I work on for several weeks. The story told by this journalist carried traces of a past controversy between freedomd“doing like everyone liked”dand efficiency and coordinationd“knowing that the day begins.” In this controversy, the standing meeting was, according to one frame, overflowingd“I was against”dand according to the other, necessaryd“there is a clear thing.” The account of the journalist gives

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also the idea that the situation had cooled down and the freedom principle had subsumed to the efficiency. The meeting has been accepted as appropriate and performed every day. This cooling down, however, did not happen automatically and was not without consequences. An older journalist who joined the company in the Fall 2007 described the introduction of the morning conference in this way: I think it was the minimum. There was a lot of resistance to it and it was taken like a sort of betrayal. It was taken like a betrayal, like we had sold our souls. All this came out later on in a meeting [in 2010]. She framed here the introduction of the standing meeting as a “minimum”dopposed to “overflowing”dby drawing on the principle of efficiency to organize work. She remembered the resistance to this principle and thus the re-framing of the meeting as a sign of betrayal (thus to be excluded) of the soul of Rue89. This controversy was overcome through a practical everyday compromise, according to which the journalists attended the meeting without agreeing with its principle of worth. As the journalist remembered, however, the situation became particularly heated during one meeting in 2010. Shortly before this meeting, the short standing conference had been accompanied by an excel sheet filled by the deputy editor in chief, registering what every journalist was planning to work on each day. The idea of this excel sheet was a tool to control and distribute the work in the newsroom and to plan the work of the editors, in accordance to the same principle of efficiency that justified the introduction of the standing meeting. The opposition to this very excel sheet was very strong on the part of the newsroom and exploded during the above-mentioned meeting in 2010 in such a heated way that the founders decided to give it up and go back to “few notes written on an envelope.” The journalists at Rue89 were simply not ready to reframe the excel sheet as appropriate not only for an efficient coordination and control but also for a better, truer, and more creative journalistic work. When she realized this, the former deputy editor in chief decided to leave the organization with the conviction that it could not be professionalized in its management. The situation thus cooled down, and an agreement on accepting the standing meeting, but making the excel sheet overflowing, was reached. As noted above, in everyday work, management and journalism seemed to encounter each other in quite silent and peaceful forms. The economic constraints of Rue89 were internalized by journalists in choosing their topics and their angles and they were even supported by journalistic justifications. The two frames sustained each other in offering mutually supportive justifications. In the rare cases of tensions between journalism and management in everyday work, these seemed to be solved by some sort of practical compromise. The morning meeting finally became an acceptable betrayal of journalists’ total freedom, but the excel sheet became inacceptable and management returned to be done on paper. Everyday compromises, however, might not mean agreement on a common principle but were simply focused on the every functioning of the website. In situations aimed at discussion, such as meetings, these compromises could be questioned, heating up the situation, and the two frames could be put in open contrast to each other. In the following section, I focus on one such situation: a strategy meeting. 5.2. A strategy meeting As opposed to everyday work, meetings are situations in which organizational members meet and discuss explicitly about a

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specific topic. In the case of the meeting in focus here, everybody at Rue89 was called to a “strategy meeting,” which was held during lunch time in the training room of the company. This time was set apart from the everyday routine work to discuss the strategy. The founders of Rue89 wanted then to announce their decision to raise funds from investors and increase the capital of Rue89, to cover the losses of the previous year and allow for the development of the company. After presenting the economic results of the previous year and introducing few changes in the newsroom organization, one of the founders presented the strategy for the coming year, as he said, There are two possible choices. One is to obtain the break-even point by tightening the belt and the other is to raise funds and make new projects, such as tablets, sport, other things, and to improve the working and living conditions of the company. We have decided to do this. Another founder added that when using that money, they would choose projects that are profitable for sure or almost for sure. So, in the presentation of the founders, the capital increase was framed as necessary not only for financial reasons but also to develop journalism at Rue89 both by improving the “living conditions,” i.e., salaries, working time, workload, and by investing in new projects. In turn, the development projects were needed to be justified not only in terms of improved journalism but also in terms of improved profitability. The founders justified the capital increase by appealing to both frames and by making them support each other, similarly to what happened in everyday work. At this point, however, an open discussion started. Several journalists who had been in the company for 2 or 3 years raised their concern about two main issues, which could be included in those “living conditions,” introduced by the founders. The first issue was the low level of salaries. The journalists asked several times whether the salaries were going to be increased. “Because we work really hard for what we are paid!” one of them said. The founders answered vaguely to this critique and said that the salary increase was included in the improvement of the living conditions of the company. Although pressured by the journalists, they did not tell a specific time when the increase would happen. They just said after the formal capital increase, which would happen in a couple of months. The second issue of concern was the recruitment of new reporters and the time of this recruitment. The answers they got were similar to those for the first issue. At some point, one of the journalists said, “We have the impression of having already heard this story 8 months ago.” This seems to be a trace of an ever-existing and never-solved controversy between two frames, differently endowing the requests of the journalists on salary increase and recruiting with worth. On the one hand, considering the aim of reaching break-even, it would be too expensive, while on the other hand, considering the quality and efforts put in journalistic work, it would be a just recognition. The founders’ initial attempt to treat this controversy as a cool situation did not convince the journalists, who wanted instead to open the debate. At the comment of the journalist, the founders tried again to harmonize the frames and justify themselves by saying that there is a fundraising to improve salaries and the working conditions, instead of just reaching the break-even. However, they could not announce anything specific. Instead of cooling down the situation, this comment unlashed a wider discussion on the management and the future of Rue89, and its vagueness was used as a proof for disqualifying the founders as managers and leaders of the company. Some of the reporters shifted the discussion from money to the quality of journalistic work, lamenting that the website was losing the specificities of

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Rue89, that there were things passing in the central column that were not good, that there were too many things, and that they were moving toward being exhaustive, instead of being pointy and sharp on a limited number of subjects. One of the reporters insisted in the critique, We don't have discussions on journalism, any longer. We talk a lot about the organization and the money, but we talk very little about how to treat the different subjects, which “angle” to tackle them with. The morning conference was to say, when [a former deputy chief-editor] was there: “do we have an ‘angle’?” “No, then we don't do it.” Now it is more to say there is this subject. We do it, you are going to do it. This could be seen as an indirect critique to the founders’ work not only for their acting in accordance to the principle of efficiency, thus subordinating the well-being of the journalists, but also for their disregarding the journalistic principle of novelty, thus decreasing the quality of the website. Another journalist jumped into the conversation and said “as a shareholder” that they do not understand how important the newsroom is as an asset for the company. He qualified himself as an owner of the company, thus framing the same critique in management terms. So, instead of putting a thousand bricks around the project, it would, indeed, be better to pile the bricks vertically on one project and reinforce the newsroom. The two journalists worked together to frame the work of the founders as not good enough both in management and journalistic terms. The founders were here criticized both as managers and as journalists. A discussion came up also about people leaving and their rea
ration, they sons for doing so. One journalist said that at Libe wonder whether they should do a paper on Rue89, as there have been eight departures in 13 months. The vice-chief editor reacted,
ration “We are also wondering if we should do a paper on Libe which does not manage to pay the employees.” A reporter then stressed the importance to deal with the problem of departures, otherwise they would go through a major turnover every second year. After heated discussions that left controversies unsolved, the meeting was concluded with an agreement on a way to organize the internal debate. They agreed on having one lunch per month, the first Friday of the month, to discuss about “internal things.” The founders also declared themselves very aware of the problems of the salaries. One of them showed as a proof of his understanding that he decreased his salary by one-third after Liberation. So, they are aware, they said. After this meeting, the journalists kept on talking among themselves about it and about the future of Rue89 and on analyzing what had happened. In that meeting, the announcement of the fundraising and increase in capital was made for the first time. The reactions of the employees were strong and put forward as a critique of the way in which this money was going to be used. Most of the journalists employed agreed on the appropriateness of the decision of raising capital to bring more money into the organization and saw this as a sign of development, therefore accepting the founders’ way of justifying that decision by making it worthy in both frames. There were, however, strong disagreements between the founders and several journalists around what the development of the organization following the capital increase should look like. In the strategy meeting, journalism and management, whose principles were in agreement to consider the decision of capital increase just, came then to appear explicitly as controversial frames, thus assessing what was worth and not worth doing and producing overflows of different kinds. On the one hand,

journalism was mobilized as in need of time, resources, and quality and as being the real reason for everybody being at Rue89 and for the website to exist. According to this frame, other activities than journalism are not worth practicing for making Rue89 as a journalistic website, as they take too much time, make the quality of journalism too low, and ultimately are a waste of money. On the other hand, management is mobilized as a way to keep the whole operations functioning and to aim at reaching break-even, the ultimate dream point for management, demonstrating economic independence of Rue89 as an enterprise. In this frame, journalists’ salaries cannot be too high, the newsroom cannot be overly populated, and other profit-generating projects should be initiated to compensate for the lack of money. 5.3. Accounts on the website Since the very beginning of the project Rue89, a blog was created to tell the story of the organization to the public. A specific section of Rue89, called “The making of,” gathered all the articles concerning the life of and at Rue89; these could be about the economic results of the company, changes in the technological platform, conferences and meetings involving Rue89, new partnership, etc. Like all other articles at Rue89, these were also open to the readers’ comments, where the appropriateness of different decisions, actions, and devices was discussed. To investigate the relationship between journalism and management, articles regarding the economy and organization of Rue89 are particularly interesting. In fact, in these articles, the founders account for their reasoning in managing Rue89 and often times explicit bring up journalistic and economic justifications of their decisions. For example, to follow up on the previously reported strategy meeting, before the summer 2011, they announced on the website the successful capital increase: Last Thursday Rue89 realized a new capital increase, which will allow to pursue its development. (…) Here we thank all investors for their support and confidence in us. (…) The development of the website goes through the improvement of its human means, of the editorial quality and of the technical means. On this last point, our readers will be able to discover in a few weeks a new platform and a new design of the website, and in the fall a new platform for the mobile. The president of Rue89 continued, But the growing importance of the website in the media landscape should be accompanied by an economic model which allows not only not to lose money, necessary condition for independence, but also to finance the developments, both in human and in technological terms. This economic battle is complex on the web and our new means now should allow us to win it. All this makes sense only in order to pursue what we have been trying to do for four years: building an independent and participatory media, totally anchored in the digital revolution. It is on this basis, on this contract, that our shareholders support us and take part in the development of the company. In this declaration, management and journalism are brought together under the overarching principle of independence, both economic and editorial. According to this founder, editorial and economic independence are mutually necessary conditions of existence. Good journalism is needed to gain economic

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independence, and a functioning economic model is needed to sustain good journalism. As we have observed in everyday work and in the strategy meeting, the two frames are harmonized in justifying the capital increase, and here, the heated controversies of the strategy meeting are cooled down by shifting focus on the decision to increase capital, which was unanimously considered just by employees. As an object, the website contributes here to keep the agreement holding, as it closes the text as a reached agreement and protects it from being opened up freely. In fact, even though comments are free and a posteriori moderated, they appear on a separate place and in a separate time on the website and only below and after the founder's text. 6. Concluding discussion At its launch, the enterprise Rue89 was initiated by journalists convinced that independence was the ultimate higher principle around which journalistic and economic values would not only conciliate but even support each other. The history of Rue89 shows, however, a number of occasions in which different principles of worthdtruth and novelty against efficiency and controldhave been tested against each other, thus leading to the emergence of journalism and management as two controversial frames for actions. The controversies have been about what is considered worth or not worth pursuing, that is to say, on defining and managing overflows. In the words and practices of employees at Rue89, it is possible to recognize civic (public service) and fame worth as journalism and industrial and market worth as management. Journalism and management, however, came to exist as antagonist progressively through the evolution of Rue89. Worth was tested in several negotiations between frames, producing different overflows in different ways. The analysis of three ways of negotiating journalism and management in everyday work, a strategy meeting, and online shows differences in the time, place, and form of meetings between frames in more or less hot situations to use Callon's (1998) expression. Different kinds of tests can be recognized in the three situations analyzed in this paper. There seem to be “organizational tests” and “public tests.” This distinction sheds light on the different meanings
venot’s (2006) idea of public of “public” in Boltanski and The justification of actions. Both “organizational” and “public tests” involve public justifications of different frames by Rue89's founders and employees, but the boundary between inside and outside the organization, which is made visible by the texts published on the website, seems to influence the meeting of frames and the hotness/ coldness of the situation. “Organizational tests” are those conducted within the organizations, rarely inscribed into a published text, but present in everyday and not-so-everyday organizational discussions. In everyday work, for instance, the tension between journalism and management seems not to be openly conflictual and is resolved by everyday mundane “small tests”dlike the discussions on the morning standing meeting showdwhich end up in compromises aimed at making the everyday news production functiondaccepting the morning meeting, making the excel sheet overflowing. These are almost invisible and come to become a “natural” part of everyday work and routines. Controversies on worth of actions, decisions, and tools in everyday work, thus, seem to be constantly cooled down, as news needs to be produced constantly and discussions on overflows cannot paralyze the ongoing work. In other situations, such as meetings, time and place are set aside for “big tests” to unfold and challenge the very orders of the two frames organizing work at Rue89. Thus, in a separate room and in a dedicated time, heated discussions around

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appropriate principles of worth and, consequently, different kinds of overflows can emerge. For example, the announcement of the capital increase in the strategy meeting provokes a debate around how money should be useddnew money-making projects or supporting journalists and their workdand thus what is to be considered unnecessary, thus excessive. “Public tests” are those that are conducted in the name of transparency and aimed to the public. They keep traces of internal discussions but are presented as solved compromises and stable agreement on overflows. The website article analyzed above, for instance, announces the capital increase and frames it as a necessary step in the name of the higher principle of independence around which the original project was started. Independence brings then together journalism and management as mutually necessary frames organizing work at Rue89, thus producing common overflows.
venot (2001) characterized organizations as “compromising The machines.” The case of Rue89 shows how agreement and disagreement between different frames in organizations are not stable over time but depends on how people and things mobilize the different frames in different times, places, and forms. In these different situations of tests and compromises, different kinds of overflows are produced, and these might be more or less problematic for the functioning of everyday work. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Hedelius and Wallander Foundation and the Broman Foundation for their generous support financing this study. I would also sincerely thank Prof. Pablo Boczkowski, Northwestern University, for our fruitful collaboration in getting access and paying visit to Rue89. The generosity and openness of this organization has been truly unique. References Abbott, Anedrew (1988). The system of Professions: An essay on the division of expert labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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