IT must be the future — the most feted, most dynamically charged news website of the lot. Eight million unique users, a 448 per cent annual growth rate and awards showering down. Want to raise another $25m, even in these straitened times? Certainly, madam. Venture capitalists duly oblige.

Your Huffington Post, just four years old, is already worth $100m. Here`s one sort of journalism that can shrug off recession, surely? Tina Brown with her ultra-competitive, somewhat derivative, Daily Beast is already turning a wheeze into a formula.

And that formula — from Arianna Huffington to Lady Harry Evans (aka Tina Brown) — seems suitably promising. No more tonnes of paper newspapers and heavy lorries; no more futile costs. Here`s the web standing proud and unencumbered, giving you the basic news you need in a neat, edited package that moves swiftly into blogged opinion. Huffington calls this her search for truth. Jaundiced readers of American newspapers would call it a long overdue reaction to too many po-faced balancing acts in monopoly papers afraid to express any opinion.

A TNS Media Intelligence analysis quoted in Advertising Age last week puts Huffington Post revenue between January and August last year at a mere $302,000 or so. It`s no secret that, at best, Huffington`s enterprise was only occasionally profitable, in an election year during which US liberals flocked to the site. The web news wunderkinds have just the same difficulty as boring old print they can`t turn what they have into worthwhile money. And the deeper the recession goes, the worse their predicament will become.

Take a closer look at where the lifeblood news on which they comment comes from. Huffington Post provides a long source list, including an impressive roll call of bloggers, but the basic facts and developments come from 40-plus newspapers and broadcasting station newsrooms catalogued as providers (including the Guardian, Times and Independent in the UK). And there`s the rub.

The Huffington Post has about 50 staff, most of them technical and production hands. It would like more reporters of its own, of course, but (unlike Brown`s Beast) doesn`t attempt to pay its big bloggers a cent. Honour and glory stand in for a cheque. As the founder of the Guardian C.P. Scott never said (in schoolboy parody) Comment is free, but facts are expensive.

The medium-term weakness of all the bright new websites, in short, is that they need grist as well as glitz. But that basic commodity has to be jackdawed together day by day. They can`t afford to uncover it for themselves. They have to skate over the surface of commenting on other people`s work.

The death of the newspaper, as tremulously foretold? OK then, so where`s the beef? There ought to be plenty of room for accommodation along Huffington`s golden road into the future but she also needs to make money first. And the curse of the new is much like the curse of the old have bright, fashionable product and huge audience. Now, will somebody please pay me a living wage?

— The Guardian, London